That Was the Big Idea
by Winter Weatherman
Summary: It's a shared effort. Speculative PeinKonan, some AU qualities.
1. Minding the Zoo

A/N: Some quick warnings up front.

-This fic expands the characters and their motives in a way that does not directly (imo) contradict canon. But this is only because canon is very very limited for both characters. This story is speculative and takes extensive liberties in filling in those blank spots.

-This fic does alter the universe around them slightly in one very significant way: it melds certain IRL historical, religious and cultural elements into the _Naruto_verse and does not rigorously define how they fit within. Kishimoto does not rigorously define his universe to the point where I feel it can support these elements codified into series terms _or _support a rigorously defined explanation for my own alterations. It's 'a Japanese fantasy world' and it's borders are not very clearly marked. I wanted the characters to be able to analyze their motives in context of these elements. I think that while these elements don't (presumably) exist in the series universe, they are referenced in the mind of the reader when looking at these characters. It's a device that I probably shouldn't have used since it's gotten me into lots and lots of trouble, let me tell ya. But it's too late for me to strip it out. So take fair warning. This fic directly references many IRL elements.

-Just to be clear, I make no claims of special knowledge on any of these subjects. I'm a lazy graphic designer who went to wikipedia. If anything, I actually know very very little about most of them.

So it's a grey area but- **I am going to call this one a partial AU.** The series universe has definitely shifted in a number of intangible ways in this story. I do feel that the characters are more or less unchanged by this, it really only gives them more information to play with. But I do know that many may disagree. This story definitely takes significant liberties with the source material that may inadvertently harsh the squee for some people. So- please be forewarned.

At one point I collaborated with another author and we shared ideas. I want to acknowledge that collaboration, but I don't want to in any way associate her with the elements of this fic that have pissed people off- that was entirely, one hundred percent exclusively my bad alone.

* * *

Konan understands it, though she is the only one who knows.

There is the hidden Akatsuki leader. There is the god realm, Pein-sama. But both are just Nagato.

"Our purpose," Nagato emphasizes to the gathered members of Akatsuki. "is to capture the Kyuubi." He pauses, intones, inflects for dramatic effect. "And get our hands on _everything_."

He's being the Akatsuki leader and speaking in the Leader's voice. Konan stands at his right hand, because the symbolism amuses both of them. Even if they aren't being the god and angel right then. Even if technically she should be the spirit rather than the son. Nagato prefers to cherrypick his theology. She watches silently.

And he's laying it on a bit thick, in her opinion. Konan watches him gesture, pause again, consider, contemplate which acting trick. The gesture with his closed fist, like the old films of Mussolini? His arms raised, like Julius Caesar? He reconsiders, puts his hand back down. The words alone are emphasis enough.

They are nine buzzing holograms gathered in a deep subterranean pocket. None of them are there personally. She and Nagato are in fact back at their tower at this very moment. Both of them are tired and cold and she's irritable, she anticipates that Nagato will be too once this ordeal is over. The Akatsuki members have been quarrelling. Sasori and his disturbing new partner are giving Itachi a hard time. Kisame has started to pipe up too.

Some of these members are people she and Nagato have barely met, and only through Madara. Some of them are people they are meeting for the first time. Akatsuki has not gathered at all for seven years. Madara has since shifted focus. Orochimaru has left. Nagato is now being interrupted by the loudest one, the blood-jutsu user Hidan. Nagato is trying to use the Leader's voice to quiet Hidan down. Both he and Konan have impassive, blurred, obscured holograph faces, this is all the Akatsuki members can see. Konan, though, has the first twinges of a migraine. And Nagato is shifting under her, his real body is tensing with frustration.

This is, as usual, Madara's doing. Madara has put a lot of loud uncontrollable people into the organization. Madara has also installed Nagato as the leader- _officially_the leader. In reality, he's the zookeeper, she thinks sourly. He's to deal with the interpersonal hassle so Madara doesn't have to bother. She's said so before. But right now, she keeps quiet and lets Nagato try, she knows that this is important to him. Being this leader. For the wrong reasons, she thinks. But she can't condemn him, she's no better. She's mired in this right along with him. They are firmly stuck in this situation, both of them, together.

That's why they can't save themselves.

It's late now. The meeting has gone hours overtime. It's now long past the advantageous window of time in late evening, where they would usually retire to one of their safe houses. It's raining hard now. They will probably stay overnight after all.

Parts of the tower are comfortably furnished, despite the fact that they don't actually live there. But she's shivering, and Nagato's arm is prickling with goosebumps under her fingers. The thermostats are acting up again, the wiring in these towers is old and frayed. The entire substructure of the city is patchy and battered from frequent shelling and somehow the repair work never fully catches up. No amount of wealth or prestige can buy you escape from the decaying shell of Amegakure. Someone will have to go and climb up through the pipes to find the wiring and solder it back together- and this will be a _monumental _hassle, given how closely she and Nagato have to guard their personal identities. The rain is hammering at the windows and pounding through the concrete walls. Their coffee has gone stone cold. Hidan has stirred Kisame up again. Konan sighs, and Nagato hears her. He rubs her shoulder idly, as if in apology for all of this. Finally he gives up trying to keep the zoo animals in line. He adjourns the meeting.

When they open their eyes, the power has finally gone out. The storm rattles the metal pipeframe of the building and the windows are streaming with rain. They are in one of the more furnished rooms, her study where she keeps her books and scrolls. Hers rather than his, because his is always a disaster area of papers and notes and scrolls and other creative clutter. Neither room has terribly great wiring or reliable heating, even without the latest battery of Amegakure electrical storms.

"I guess I'm in bad mood after all," Nagato sighs glumly, looking out at the storm. He says this in his own voice again, the Leader's voice requires the holographic buzz and distortion to really work properly.

"There was a high pressure system and a cold front in from the north." Konan says, to comfort him. She doesn't blame him. He's tried his best with the zoo animals. This is all _Madara's_ fault anyway.

She disentangles herself from his warmth and his arms. As the first hour ticked by and the power fuzzed in and out, as the furnace stuttered and the cold began to seep in though the walls, he pulled her into his arms. Usually neither of them will bother with the cloaks for these holographic appearances. But tonight he left his on, unbuttoned, forgotten in the ordeal of getting their rowdier members to show up and settle down and be quiet for their first formal meeting. It was warm there, in one another's arms, under his cloak.

"Maybe that's my bad mood for tomorrow, approaching now so it's ready for the morning." Nagato says, crankily now, from the couch where they both sat. He clearly struggled to keep his patience with the Akatsuki members, and now his mood is unraveling. Konan hears it in his voice.

"Nothing but Amegakure business scheduled for tomorrow." she says. "We can sleep in." Good thing, because it's now well past midnight. She hears him sigh. And then the sound of him getting up, getting the coffee cups dealt with because otherwise both of them will forget and there will be fossilized cups of half-drunken coffee all over the place. Madara will see them the next time he waltzes in to inflict himself upon them- and will comment. How _adorably _scatterbrained they both are. Why, how _amazing _it is that they can run an entire village. Nagato will cringe, Konan will seethe and- all of that is best avoided if possible. She's watching the storm and folding paper too fast and roughly, wondering why this person is still in their lives at all when Nagato comes up behind her, and slides his cloak around her shoulders.

Embraces her, the piercings in his ear cold against her cheek.

And she turns around and holds him tightly too, avoids his necklace of thorns, kisses his neck gently. If he's upset then she'll tell him that she thinks he does well with Akatsuki- as best as one could with that bunch. She'll do this to inoculate him against Madara's next visit, where Madara will be full of his usual sweet poison-tongued cleverly-veiled cutting little calculated _criticisms_.

Madara will come to the tower- where they do not live- and for that precise reason.

Nagato kisses her back, very gently, like she might start to split into paper seams. She seems irritable enough to do it, and in his imagination her jutsu is also connected to her mood, the way his is. Well, the way _Yahiko's _jutsu is. Was. Yahiko was the one who could control the rain. Nagato has had this body long enough now, long enough for it to seem natural and right, like it's his own.

Not that waking up as a redhead isn't still sometimes a shock. An existential shock, because the face is no longer Yahiko's, and it's not just the eyes either. It's not just the piercings. Konan was not wild about the piercings at first- _so I'll cut myself open every time I kiss you?, _she said, upon seeing the snakebite studs under his lip- but Nagato was undaunted. If he was going to be shocked by his reflection, he ought to be _really _shocked. And piercings would have never been Yahiko's thing. He had plenty of stories about his no-nonsense parents and how they disapproved of most things that were too weird, and Yahiko himself could be like a smaller teenaged version of the same at times. What would Yahiko have said? _Jeez, you look like a porcupine. _Something like that. These pieces of metal are functional, chakra-conductive; but they are also a division, a marking of a new person. Not Yahiko, and not just Nagato as he was before, either. Not Pein- this is a supernatural entity that only sometimes is conjured by the heart and mind of a human. The nature of that heart and mind, he thinks, _that's _the real question.

And it's completely possible to kiss her and have no one get cut. Even Konan had conceded the point. She adopted a few piercings of her own, a little silver ball under her lip and a ring in her belly button. One other place. She's a bit tense as he holds her, but she's relaxing a little bit as he does this. And he does have to be a bit careful, the piercings under his lip have a sharp point. But it's fine, he's not being Pein right now. He's not being the Leader. He can do this now, he's shaken off the persona- the voice, words, mannerisms, worldview and personality- of the Leader. It's not always easy, to him these things are not just masks or costumes, they are entire states of mind. They're like other, satellite versions of himself. Other people that he didn't end up becoming- but could have, at least hypothetically. A chance to be things that he never was- like commanding, decisive, authoritative. Like naturally, infallibly confident. Like Yahiko.

Maybe that's it. Yahiko could always make other people listen. And while Nagato should probably be disturbed by this thought, right now he finds it comforting.

Though right now Konan has also begun to silently radiate a slow, cold undercurrent of displeasure. It's ironic, really... that she is also able to charge the atmosphere with her moods. And Nagato, for his part, leaves bits of paper and notebooks and post-it notes full of scrawls of his handwriting, unfinished notes- everywhere, scattered all over the tower and in fact every single one of their safe houses like multicolored confetti. They say that married couples begin to resemble one another, he muses, washing out the coffee pot. But then he remembers who said this.

Madara- _how sweet, just like a married couple.  
_  
And- _why don't you make it official? I'll be your witness._

And- never mind. It's bad enough that Madara oozes into their tower, into their business, into their lives. It's too much to have Madara in his own head too.

He's too scattered to handle anything right now anyway, too keyed up with adrenaline from trying to handle Deidara and Hidan- in particular Hidan, who's always a problem- and Kisame too, Kisame being apparently constitutively unable to be serious for even a moment.

Even fifteen minutes.

"It should have taken a half hour." Konan says. "At most. Not three hours. We should have been home by eleven. He's done this to us on purpose."

The _he _is Madara. The _he _is always Madara. Except sometimes when the _he _is Yahiko. This contradiction _is _somehow both too familiar and disturbing for Nagato to think about. He's tired. He lets Konan go and he contemplates the storm, focuses with Yahiko's body and his water jutsu to see if it's worth it to quell the rain. To even try. When he looks back Konan has retreated to the couch where they both sat. She's gone back to the warm indentation they made in the cushions. His cloak has fallen open, and her hair is starting to escape from it's bun. Her flower is also gone. She has a piece of paper in her hands, and is folding it with practiced speed.

"That new one with the clay explosives," she adds darkly. "..that is definitely directed at us. He's trying to get at you actually. But me too, he makes you upset and he makes me angry. This is how he controls us."

She's complaining about Madara. Calculating and figuring Madara's actions is exactly how she complains about him, Nagato has lived with her long enough to know this instantly. And it's also something he should leave alone. They've had the Madara argument- constantly, for years now, for more than a decade- had it to death. It's not even a real argument since both of them are on the same side of the issue.

But he can't help himself. "The real problem is Hidan. He won't show me respect. I'm going to have to hurt him if this continues."

A snort from the couch, delicate as the motion of her fingers. "He would enjoy it if you did."

But it's too late now, his mood has deteriorated fully. There is something about complaining that is contagious. When she does it, he starts. And when he starts he finds it hard to stop. "He would. And _I_ don't want to hurt him. He knows that, he's trying to force me to do it."

Konan thinks to herself that this is not true, that is not how Akatsuki is reacting to their leader. They are not prodding and poking at Nagato as Madara does. They're just treating him they way they would any other authority figure, testing him and his willingness to punish them and force them back into line. There is absolutely no question of his ability to do so, Nagato has had the Leader flex his power enough to convince even _that _bunch of this. So it's not that they think he _can't _crack the whip. Nagato believes that there is a deep philosophical difference between the Leader and Pein, and Konan will allow that Nagato would probably be the expert there. But here he's wrong, the real threat presented by the Leader is not at all different from the threat presented by Pein, and Pein is just the blunt-instrument use of power.

Nagato, however, is now too frustrated and emotionally exhausted to become either of them, the iron severity of the Leader or the impassive indifferent force of Pein. Right now Nagato is definitely being _Nagato_, and warming to his subject at that. "Hidan is bad enough, but Kisame will _not _listen to me. He won't stop making jokes. I don't know what Sasori hopes to accomplish by harassing Itachi about Orochimaru. And both of them encourage Deidara!"

The name itself is a bombshell, which she should have anticipated, should have not reacted to. But it comes out of nowhere. The precise practiced sequence of folds- skips- just for a second, her fingers slip.

Just for a second. Her face is still, but of course he notices. He says, quietly. "I'm sorry." And moves on. "I don't like this situation with Itachi. I'm not convinced that he isn't funneling more information back to Konoha than even Madara knows."

"Presumably Madara isn't inclined to sabotage his own operation.." Konan replies with factual detachment. But this _is _Madara she's talking about, so then after a moment she adds "At least, it's not in his best interests to..." She makes a vaguely resigned face, and completes her paper flower. She sets it down and attends to her hair. "_Presumably _the fun of sabotaging his own operation is outweighed by the fun of..."

"Of taking over the world with his sharingan." Nagato finishes, ill-temperedly. "That's one thing, but if I strangle Hidan tomorrow then we don't catch anything and no one gets to take over the world, for _any reason. _Though I think if I were to strangle one person in Akatsuki right now it would be- and I'm sorry-" he makes a necessary apologetic glance to just make sure she's all right. "Deidara. And while I'm at it, I might include Sasori in that, for trying to bother Itachi and for not listening to me and just on general principle! Kakuzu would probably approve as long as he got to collect the bounties! And no one likes Zetsu since he's always talking to himself about eating all of us! And _Madara_-"

He catches himself, by the harsh edge to his own voice. He's crankier than he thought, too. Outside the wind gathers, pulls, roars dully through the walls. Mentioning Madara, being openly angry with him, is a line in the sand. A faultline. Best left and ignored and covered up. Though at least they know why they hate Madara, it's not something they have any problem admitting to themselves.

So much for that discussion, Nagato thinks tiredly.

They quickly decide they're too tired to talk further after that. They go up to what is not their bedroom, but has a bed and a better patch of the furnace. The storm rages on. Under the rock and concrete and faulty wiring, one hundred stories down, seven basements under that, in the machines and the water and the wires and the rinnegan connection, Pein's bodies sleep.

"Don't feel bad about it." she says to Nagato in the darkness. The rain is hammering dully in the background. "It's okay to mention him." To refer to him. Imply him. Invoke his memory. It's funny, when she looks at Nagato now, Yahiko's bright red hair, she doesn't see Yahiko at all. It's just Nagato.

Just Nagato's soft, hesitant voice from the person holding her, the arms she's slept in for the last twelve years. "It's okay to miss him too. I'd feel worse if I didn't.. and if I felt nothing... come here, we should thank him for what he did for us." Just Nagato.

So she kisses him, because he is still alive, and he kisses her, because he was able to stay with her. And those last twelve years have been possible, because of Yahiko. And it is funny, maybe. Maybe it really is twisted to enjoy it, to feel no contradiction, the person kissing her, holding her, undressing her and the hard flesh moving inside of her is Nagato. They have one another. And no matter how cold it gets, it's warm in one another's arms.

Like Yahiko would have wanted.

So they assume. Because Yahiko is gone, Yahiko has passed into the afterlife. Assuming there is an afterlife at all. Assuming there is a spirit that animates the flesh of the body. Assuming that there are gods and angels that care, or any that don't care, but still exist. Assuming there's anything to believe in at all; she prefers hard logic, Nagato mostly uses theology as an alibi and Yahiko wouldn't have given a damn about gods existing or not. Ironically, none of them were ever very religious.

And Akatsuki scatters, attends to their hunts.

Deidara is out there somewhere, completely oblivious. Only Madara would know.

Deidara is new, one of Madara's big new finds. He's loud, forceful, spirited, restless, his temper is as hot as his enthusiasm. His hair is blond, at least. Not the same at all. But his eyes are bright and hard and piercing, this and his personality makes the resemblance far too close for comfort.

The next day, village business is going on as usual. There is trouble from the south, but this is routine now. Nagato throws down the newspaper in a momentary fit of irritation that is also, by now, routine.

"They called us sectarian warlords- again. I am- _Pein_ is _not _a _sectarian warlord, _that is precisely _not _the point of what we're doing here. Am I being unclear? Am I somehow failing to articulate our guiding ideology? Do we have to send them _another _press release?" he says, among other things, before finally stalking off outside.

The rain is pounding the city. It's hard enough to cause damage in some areas and Pein really ought to do something about that. Nagato goes out on his statuehead to see if Yahiko's jutsu can fight a weather system intent upon hail. Konan checks in on the village bureaucracy, she and Nagato have delegated much of their leadership down a vast administrative chain. Then she is free to read and to be alone with her paper and her thoughts. The rain lightens, somewhat. Nagato comes back in, soaked. It seems as if even the mighty Pein can't fight a high pressure system, gods still can be defeated by the weather.

Yahiko, Nagato thinks, would have parked himself outside and stubbornly hammered at the sky until it caved for him.

Yahiko would have just _made _it do what he wanted.

Deidara unsettles both of them.

Maybe it's fitting that Deidara is the one who comes through.

With the Ichibi, extracted from the sandtrap of Sunakagure.

He probably should have expected this, but still Nagato is quietly amazed. He and Konan have run possible approach scenarios for separating this village from their Kage. But the village is like a reinforced anthill. Or a stacked termite's nest, all built upon a flat plane of sand, no good strategic approach points, miles and miles of crystal clear sightlines in all directions. And the place is even more militarized than Konoha. Maybe it's fortunate that everyone in Akatsuki is at least partially crazy, you'd have to be out of your mind to attack Sunakagure head-on.

Which is apparently _exactly _what Deidara did.

But the call comes, Deidara yelling carelessly in their ears with his report. He has the Kage. His voice is loud and forceful in the same way, but it's the sheer nerve that really reminds him, Nagato thinks. Yahiko always just walked right up to things and demanded they do what he wanted.

But this time the meeting is different, easier. Nagato is getting better with the persona, the Leader's voice and the way to use it. When he summons the stone monolith, even the loudmouths quiet down and raise their eyes, gleaming in the semi-darkness. Suddenly even they have nothing stupid or insolent or disruptive to say. It really is effective, he thinks a bit sadly. Power. Just pure unadulterated _power_.

Faith isn't the key. Power is. _It opens doors and borders, _he muses to himself as he gets the Akatsuki members in order, ready to begin the sealing. As if that's all that matters, that's all anyone needs to stop resisting, to stop obstructing, to believe. To go along with what he says. Raw power. Pein's iron fist.

Pein wouldn't care one way or another about Deidara or a dead friend, the past- anything. Pein has no emotions and ultimately no thoughts. He is just power.

Still, in Nagato's mind, Pein is less than his own heart, his own emotions. This must be a strength, Nagato has always believed it was. Even when Yahiko called him a big wuss, he just blinked, uncomprehending. Everything to him was feeling. And that the rinnegan was given to such a person surely must be mean something. All that power put into the hands of someone who does not- _cannot- _worship it.

Still, maybe Konan is right, maybe they are too vulnerable about Yahiko. If some loud missing-nin from Iwagakure can get to them this way...

Then again, that's Madara for you. _Madara would twist a knife in his own back if he thought it would hurt us, _Konan says. And Nagato winces, but she's not wrong. Nagato almost has to wonder at Madara, because he seems to be so pure in his intent. As if simply being selfish and self-aggrandizing and rapacious was a religion, it demanded endless sacrifices. Madara does it so completely that it's almost an art form. The grand master of warmongering. The master of destroying everything around him without thought or restraint. And while Nagato really should pity him, mostly he's angry.

Mostly he's depressed, actually. Madara is like a black hole sucking all the hope out of the room, out of his thoughts, out of the world at large. Mostly angry... still sometimes he does pity Madara. And the ritual to extract the Ichibi is long, three days. He has plenty of time to think about it.

Plenty to keep his mind occupied; so many unstable energies in the air and restless people to keep quiet and focused, the jutsu to keep steady and proceeding. The plan is starting now. Before it was all theoretical, but now they actually have their hands on a tailed beast.

"Feeding time at the zoo," Konan observes acidly.

Deidara is silent and still, his hands locked into the seal. He no longer resembles Yahiko. The ritual wears on. Nagato quells the disruptions. Konan is impassive even under the hollow black buzz, the rainbow moirés of the hologram.

No one notices. No one knows their past.

Except Madara. Coming calling like the ghost of Christmas past. Rattling his chains. Trying to rattle Nagato, actually. Trying to yank _his _chain. Always succeeding.

"Deidara? Oh.. well I though he would be a nice surprise for you. You describe your lost friend so well..." Madara has a smile like a shark.

Konan throws him out into the rain for that, but it's too late. The damage is done. He got his jibe in. Nagato always assumes the face and the manner and even the mindset of Pein for these involuntary little visits. But it's no use, Pein is sometimes just a cover story for Nagato anyway. Pein is just a force that destroys things. Words go right through him, and Madara gets what he wanted, he gets the dagger right through Pein and into Nagato's back.

Into his heart. And in Konan's, because when Madara's _really _gotten a good shot in, he gets both of them at once. Two birds with one stone, she thinks, watching him stroll out into the rain. His cloak swirling in the restless winds. He's whistling a cheery tune.

And then he's singing after a moment, in the voice that will become Tobi's eventually. Though they haven't met Tobi just yet. At the time this is just new and bizarre. And like a punch in the gut. "...I get all the news I need from the weather report, I can gather all the news I need from the weather report..."

Which sets Konan's teeth on edge. This is Madara in a nutshell. This _underhandedness_. If they confronted him he'd just plead wide-eyed innocence. He'd say _I happen to like the song, I don't see why you're so upset... oh, how clumsy of me. I'm so sorry, I forgot._ And never mind that they told him, years ago, that this was Yahiko's favorite song, the song that Yahiko loved to sing about himself, goofy and off-pitch and too loud and joyfully because that was Yahiko, that was the way Yahiko was. And in their grief they believed in Madara's sympathetic ear, leaned on it, told him. Told him about Yahiko, and now that grief is twisting a knife between Konan's ribs. After all these years. She hopes Nagato didn't hear.

"..wait, is that...? Is he..?" She hears his tired, heavy quiet sigh. It's quiet disbelief. "He's such a bastard."

"Understatement." Konan says with tense, sudden anger. "Understatement, understatement, understatement.." she could go on saying it for some time and it wouldn't even come close. Her teeth are clenched.

Meanwhile the concrete well of the streets have picked up the resonant rich tone of Madara's voice, fading off as he strolls away. "..heeeey, I've got nothing to do today but _smile_.."

"I wish this body could strike him with lightning." Nagato mutters. He shuts the door and locks it.

"Maybe Pein should pay him a visit." Konan says icily. She plays with her Akatsuki ring, Nagato can see her doing it. Twisting it. She might not even be aware she's doing it consciously. "Isn't there some.. scriptural nonsense for this? 'Man cannot comprehend the ways of divinity? No one can know the hour, nor can they know the day'..?"

Yes, something like that, Nagato thinks.

"I don't know where Pein's mechanical life support would come from then," he sighs. "I don't know who would pay Pein's utility bill for the generators." He and Konan fund half of Amegakure's infrastructure themselves. So they'll loot their own treasury? Fail to pay the electrical bill to themselves? Amegakure's economy is a tightrope. And Madara's money is lifeblood, life support for five bodies and one entire village. "I don't know who would find Pein another machinist. I don't know where even Pein would find a locksmith capable of keeping Madara out, should we steal his equipment... "

But he knows that she's well aware. He knows why she needs to say things like that, even though she knows. He knows, he understands her. She understands him. They _understand this situation,_ Madara is like a cancerous tumor grown deeply into your body. Ingrown into them both. You could try to hack him out, but you'd probably kill yourself in the process.

But you thought about doing it anyway. Every single day.

"That's it." Konan is saying. "We can't allow this anymore." she looks over to him, to his eyes which somehow she's gotten used to. When Nagato hasn't even figured out how to look at himself, not really. His reflection is complicated.

...Yahiko's face in the mirror. The slow endless hypnotic ripple of the rinnegan.

"No, we can't leave ourselves open like this any longer." Konan whispers, close to him now, his hand on the door frame, and her hand covering his, their nails painted black, fingers entwining.

Together.

Nagato gets himself back together and becomes Pein, becomes pure power, fire rather than flesh, feels the muscles in his face take up the illusion, freeze as if carved from marble, like the impassive face of a stone angel.

Passive, he thinks. Impassive, yes. But _passive _too, Pein was born in Madara's hands. Make no mistake of that, he reminds himself. Never lose track of that.

But it's strangely comforting, being within the impassive existence of the god. Feeling nothing. Power and carved marble, absolute clarity- nothing else, no other thought or expression. Like Konan's face, in fact, white and perfect, her eyes hooded and somehow there is a mystery to it, her assumption of the face and role of the angel.

So Pein and his angel go down to the machine room. Nagato and Konan lock every door they can get their hands on first, Nagato and Konan are both noted for their intense paranoia. But that done, the god and the angel descend... into the underworld, Nagato thinks. In the deep stone basements, the machines hum sonorously. The water trickles. It's soothing. Nagato can close his eyes, anywhere, feel the fluid ripple of the rinnegan connecting him, opening up the doors of his mind to other eyes, other hands. The ambient sound of this room.

The hidden body is the one that's clouded for him. It's there, yes- he can feel it. Occluded. There. It's just the sensory signals of the other bodies in the way. But if he closes his eyes- his eyes in Yahiko's body- concentrates. Yes, he can feel it. His own body, it's connecting rinnegan eyes, in the carefully constructed web of machines and chakra and water. His heart skips, or maybe it's the body's heart. The two hearts as one. He feels it when Konan touches it.

The body. His old one. It hasn't grown, but somehow it's hair seems longer. Konan thinks so, though she knows that it's hair probably isn't growing, it's not really alive anymore, not in that way. Instead it's frozen in some kind of suspended twilight sleep of aliveness. Caught in the ripple of the rinnegan, some kind of intermediary state. Some position on the wheel of life. She doesn't know which, and even Nagato with his theological scrolls isn't sure himself.

Nagato was growing his hair out a bit then. He was seventeen. This body is biologically adult, but it's still _seventeen_, it's hair is still long, Nagato standing beside her is now thirty-two this year. So is she, his birthday is in September and hers in in February, they are almost the same age.

The body's hair spreads out around the white face of a boy of seventeen.. a black halo, she thinks. A droplet of ink dropped into clear water. A crushed paper flower, one side of the origami sheet wet black, the other midnight blue. Ripples form and crisscross the white skin as she pulls her hand out, the droplets fall, Nagato's hand comes around hers and their fingers are wet, entwined like they have a million times before. In terror or passion or solidarity. Or just because they are together.

"I do thank him." she whispers. Because no matter what else is going wrong in their lives, they are together. Nagato assuming the persona of Pein is still Nagato. Nagato assuming the persona of the Leader is also still Nagato. Nagato is the one putting his arms around her as she twirls the body's dark hair around her hand, then traces the line of it's jaw with her wet finger; there is no question of this in either of their minds. All of these things are just other faces that are still Nagato. Just droplets in the ocean, ripples in the endless circulation, the spinning wheel, the closed circle of the rinnegan, just faces and one person at the center of the wheel. Six faces, twenty five years of knowing that person. No confusion, she thinks.

Yahiko's face is just one more.


	2. Drafting the Blueprints

She's right about how Madara operates, Nagato has decided. Madara first sets them up, the serene god and the indifferent angel. Then moves to shatter both- infuriate her, paralyze him. Control them both.

The god is a force of nature, drowned and numbed by a stratospheric scale of power that renders everything meaningless. The angel is a witness, mute and uncaring. Still, indifference is her Achilles heel, not his. Not until recently. Before the latest daily atrocity from Madara, there is the sealing.

This jutsu is new, Nagato has been planning it for some time. But he never quite knows how these things will work until he does them, they are mostly flashes of insight glimpsed in the timeless otherspace of the rinnegan. He has ideas. He always has a _lot _of ideas, intuitions, visions of how things will turn out- ideally, of course. This illusionary dragon jutsu to link these nine beasts together is one of his best, he's very proud of it. He's always liked cooperative jutsu, the way they use many ninjas at once, and the way their energies and concentration all comes together-

-to unity. Even these Akatsuki; who can't get along and, to be honest, probably don't even _want _to get along, would go out of their way to _not _get along. They work together, all of them. The harmony of so many deeply different people, and then- the Ichibi is sealed.

And the Kage is dead, but this is necessary. The Leader is not concerned. The Leader is a bit like the stone monolith that will seal and hold the beasts: black and fearsome and holding a weighted silence. Being the Leader is a bit like becoming a monster, which intrigues him.

At any rate, the Leader is a very businesslike person, so the Kage dies down in the dust and without ceremony of any kind. His body has in fact turned to dry, cracked clay. As if he were just another one of Sasori's ball-joined puppets, made of wood and string and counterweights full of sand. _Ashes to ashes_, Nagato thinks, inside the black emptiness of the Leader.

The meaning of this death, if any, will be a matter for Nagato to figure out- later, the Leader could not possibly be less concerned. Likely the Leader will order Zetsu to dispose of the body as soon as the sealing is complete.

And the Leader does not so much as look at the small pale corpse, slowly spider-webbing with cracks and falling apart.

It's actually himself that Nagato is thinking about at this moment. His lack of concern. The Kage is dead- and he doesn't care. He wonders, is it just that he didn't know the Kage? Or that this person is just an inconvenient vessel for a tailed beast, something to shuck like a sunflower seed, discard, forget about? His complete indifference is fascinating to him.

They _are _among the war wounded, he thinks, and not for the first time. Himself, Konan. The survivors, but not unscathed. Not by landmines or bomb jutsu, not like the buildings pockmarked and cracked and scarred. Not like the amputee soldiers, the ninjas smashed open on the wet concrete killing floor of Amegakure, their blood dripping down into the pipes and seagulls feasting gruesomely on their wet red innards. Not so vivid, immediate, not something that easily understood, even by the two of them. They still have all their fingers, their limbs; no- the damage is invisible. Like minute internal bleeding, he thinks. Something injured so deeply inside of him that it would take years to show the effects. It would not show up at all until adulthood.

So yes, maybe he has grown into a monster. Maybe he has. This too, somehow is far less horrible to him than it should be. He was not a bad child, not the way other children were naughty or disobedient, but there was always something not right about him. He wasn't the way other children were- too quiet, too incomprehensible. Too ineffectual and impossible, too much for his parents to deal with in their limited time, the country was being invaded. Not worth, he thinks, any particular emotional investment... as if they already knew on some level that he would be of no help to their family, and lost before it would matter anyway.

Or _he _would lose _them_, which really is the same thing. And it _doesn't_ matter, they were not around very long. Not long enough to have a lasting effect on who he is today. There weren't very many families left in his generation once the smoke cleared. Just a lot of orphans, invisible wounded. Sasori is one of them, he's almost the same age Nagato and Konan are. Only a few years older. Sasori and his body turned to wood, to parts, to chakra strings and a kind of quietly, carefully self-maiming immortality.

Still, maybe the only way to grow in a world of monstrosities is to become monstrous yourself.

_Monsters_, Nagato muses silently, guiding the jutsu. _Miracles_. To him these two words are linked, twinned. There is no reason, not logically, but together they are things that are rare- so shocking and different, so transformative. They scorch the surface of society, disturb everyone and everything around them. And from that dissonance comes new, violent change. The rinnegan is both, miraculous and monstrous.

New, monstrous ways of thinking. After all, he thinks, only a monster was capable of hefting Amegakure out of it's sinkhole of history.  
_  
And another monster, _he thinks, _comes to our door and troubles us_. _And we are pushed to our limit, incited into something new and dangerous._ For better or for worse.

He opens the Leader's eyes.

Now, near the ritual's end, the Akatsuki members are quiet. They've expended their energy, and now all are settled and focused. The Leader nods. Silently approving.

Though there was trouble. Far more than expected, as Konoha-nin came streaming out of the east to rush to the Kage's aid.

Curiously. As Konoha and Suna have not been traditional allies. But, then again, Nagato has heard stories of this Kazekage. It's a very young man, a boy of only sixteen. Only a bit older than Konan and himself when they lost Yahiko. And yet here this person is, running Sunakagure. And here comes his historical enemies, rushing to save him.  
_  
A miracle,_ he thinks, Nagato smiling under the black static of the Leader, _in the service of a monster._

At any rate, the Leader handles it. Nagato had a premonition about it, you could say- the eventualities resulting from nine kidnappers effectively paralyzed over the sealing of their freshly snatched prey. In fact, Nagato, for all his ineffectual wispiness, was the designer of all these extravagant jutsu. The Leader is merely a voice of commanding authority. Pein is merely numb mindless power. It takes a human mind, a feverish kind of insanity, to come up with ideas like this. In the end, he thinks, it's not Pein who is responsible, or who even pulls the detonation switch.

It's _himself_.

And the shouten jutsu is Nagato himself, all his doing. Pein has this ability, a way to be in two places at once and inhabit another body to the point of seeing through it's eyes, feeling it's pain and exertion. Nagato found a way to displace it and share it, apply it to entire separate people. The Leader merely assigned it.

To Itachi and Kisame, who despite what Nagato himself may think of their attitudes or trustworthiness, still have performed beautifully. Both have easily synchronized with his jutsu, and the Konoha-nin have been effectively delayed, the Ichibi is sealed. The ritual finishes.

Nagato opens his eyes.

Back in the tower. Konan has already disconnected her holographic self from the cavern. And retreated, Nagato thinks, to her study. To be the practical one, and keep things running smoothly in this wreckage of a village all around them. This slowly healing wound, he thinks.

Sasori is dead. The news comes finally in the slow, long aftermath of the struggle with the Konoha-nin. Itachi and Kisame have long since been disconnected from the jutsu, Deidara and Sasori have engaged the Konoha squadron that finally broke in to the cavern. As Nagato sits out on the statuehead and rubs his tired eyes, the Leader is appraised that the Konoha nin have destroyed the cave in their battle with Sasori, and made off with the Kage's corpse.

And Deidara blew himself up to shake off his Konoha pursers. But survived.

Sasori was killed by his. The death is finally confirmed by Zetsu in the onset of a grey, wet morning.

Nagato looks out at the grey wet face of the city. It's patched industrial towers, it's liquid neon glow. It's subliminal noise of generators and fans and rainfall. He can imagine Konan's response, conjure the sudden flash of ice in her eyes from this tangled electrified corpse of a city.

_Good riddance._ is what she'll say.

Or worse- _How can they tell?_

He'll tell her after they sleep. Though as the primary strategic planner, she'll have to be informed very soon. Nagato himself tends to focus more on the philosophical implications, the overall vision, the actual staging of the plan is not his forte. But then again, he and Konan are the same that way. So theoretical; so taken with ideas that neither of them can seem to remember to take action. They get lost in thought, forget everything other than the idea, the concept. They're not used to being reminded to _do _anything about it anymore, Yahiko is long gone.

In fact, both of them almost seemed baffled when the Ichibi's jinchuuriki was caught, when things actually started to _happen_.

Still, this can wait for later. The ritual makes the bones in Nagato's hands ache, his head buzz with the echo of the hologram, having had that sound cocooned around him for days on end. Changing bodies seems too hard, too much trouble; and all of them would feel the aches and pains in god realm anyway, god realm has very intense sensory feedback. Getting injured or roughed up in a fight hurts the most in this body by far. Maybe that's why Yahiko was always so enraged when they were attacked, mugged for their money or food. He was driven to fury by the pain.

How appropriate, Nagato thinks. How ironic and twisted and wrong. Yahiko was nothing like Konan and himself. The real irony is that he can't quite decide what Yahiko would think, would say, if he could be here right now.

Never mind. Time for rest.

Nagato is not leaving for the safe houses without Konan. Firstly, he has to find out which one it will be today, that's a Byzantine security procedure that she directs and he finds entirely overwhelming. And he never leaves her if he can help it. She's probably shut herself in her study, buried her head in her books.

And reminding one another to sleep is one of the things they do...

He was right, that's exactly where she is.

With all of her massive collections of paper. But hers is much more neatly organized than Nagato's own, despite having much more of it. Her scrolls and books tend to be put away in a logical sequence that seems to let her find anything she wants quickly; she doesn't ever walk around the tower wondering where she left a particular set of notes the way Nagato does, having set it down and wandered off on some other tangent of thought. Most of her work tends to stay in here, where she can concentrate, and where Madara is implicitly forbidden to enter. Most of her origami is here, and it's become bigger and more complex as the years have passed. It all has incomprehensible multisyllabic names now.

On the top of her bookshelf is the massive model of a geodesic... _something_, Nagato has forgotten the exact name. It's very long and mathematical. The years have brought her away from the flowers and animals of her youth, and now she mostly builds vast complex geometric figures, some of which are apparently four dimensional- though Nagato has only ever understood the first few sentences of her explanations of this.

"It's the final stellation of a hecatonicosachoron, with 120 cells and 720 faces." she says when he asks, having come in and looked up at it. It's perched in it's multicolored glory, casting a complicated shadow behind it from the low angle of her desklight. She's made it out of hundreds of pieces of origami paper. Nagato remembers seeing it in various stages of construction. An experimental piece on the way to learning to split and reconstitute her own body, she said. Paper and flesh, she said, are the same, the material doesn't matter. All that matters is the geometries of chakra. _Like this,_ she said, touching his closed eyelid, meaning the rinnegan and it's concentric circles. _And like that,_ the six bodies, the complex machine-aided jutsu. Something this had made clear to her, her own startling new jutsu had flowered soon after.

A four dimensional flower in fact, Nagato thinks; and is able to smile slightly about that, be in love with her where the Leader and Pein are both powerless to feel anything. The jutsu she made, her body unfolding and opening and expanding. Like an angel gracefully shedding the limits of her flesh; an act of epiphany like the opening of his third, hidden, higher rinnegan eye.

"I think I'll never remember what it's called." he says to her, sick with love for her. Completely unable to be anything _but _overwhelmed by it. She's at her drafting table and he's gone over to cuddle her under his arm.

"It's just a convex regular polychoron," she replies lightly, as if this were something completely normal to say. "You can think of it as a four dimensional dodecahedron. It's not very complicated at all..." But now she's teasing him gently, or maybe it would be more that she's teasing _them_, because they've had this conversation many times before. Nagato would ask what the beautiful, complex shape she was building was called. She would answer, but somehow the long technical names would never stick with him. And in truth, he just likes to talk to her about them, to hear her speak such a different, precise language.

Like the strange divine words of an angel, he thinks. Beyond man's understanding.

Beyond _his_, anyway. He is a philosopher, and while both of them were good students, his experiences with math to date have been more than enough for him. This is why they are a team, co-conspirators. This is why god has his angel.

"...what are you working on?" he says. "We should get some rest." This gesture, putting his arms around her while she works at her designs and plans is so familiar. It's the inverse of the other gesture, where she comes up on the statueface to find him lost in thought. Floats over to him and showers him, sometimes, with her silent weightless cloud of paper butterflies. Her flesh, he thinks, always. The geometric beauty of her body. Just before she envelops him entirely.

Even on the day he met her, she had already exhausted the existing origami patterns. He remembers her planning out new ones, drawing them out with anything she could get her hands on. A sharpened stone in the mud, if necessary. A stub of a pencil Yahiko, ever resourceful, had found alongside the roads, or in the soggy rubble of burnt-out office buildings. Maybe some newspapers they'd found too, and hung to dry for her. These days, though, she has real architect's tools: a steel compass and many rulers. Her mechanical pencils sit in a neat box on her bookshelf. Her designs have long since become staggering. Mind-boggling, really.

"Just some mapping." she says. As she gets up to gather her cloak, he picks up one of her schematics.

"The hell's _that?"_ Yahiko would say cheerfully, upon encountering one of Konan's diagrams. Or else, his perennial favorite: "That's a lot of lines!"

"It's a diagram for your origami jutsu?" Nagato asks her, over his shoulder. As opposed to being just for her origami, though he supposes these things are one and the same now.

"Not yet." she says, from the bookshelf. She's putting her pencil away, re-stacking her rulers. "That's the net of a dodecicosacron. See how it's face-transitive? And remember how we found out that all chakra is a hexagram prism from the rinnegan?"

Nagato does remember, and he remembers being able to follow about a quarter of her theory. But it's true that the rinnegan does work in circles, cycles, and in six points. His own jutsu designs come from his imagination, his intuition, and his interpretation of theological patterns against the insight of the rinnegan. Her schematic is immaculate and precise, so unlike his own messy digressing notes, full of bits of unconnected thoughts and ideas. Of possibilities. Not like this hard crystalline science. He looks and there are hundreds of shapes and angles; beside it a neat column of Konan's hyper-precise notes, as if etched by a laser.

"I'll make it into a crease diagram tomorrow," she says. She's come up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. "because those are made for supercomplex figures."

"...supercomplex is the word," he says. "exactly. What was it called?"

"A dodecicosacron." she rattles off effortlessly. "With 60 faces. Beside it there- that's a dodecicosahedron." Her hand moves around him, strokes the line of his thumb. Such a small touch, and yet... He smiles, secretively. This is how it starts, the tiniest things just like that. She indicates the second, even more complex drawing. Then, for his benefit, her voice turned soft and gentle. "It's different. But also the same."

"It's beautiful... even though I can't really see what it is." He can't see it, the way these shapes come together, the way her ideas work. It's beyond him, and her notes have to be approached with caution because they can give him unpleasant calculus flashbacks if he looks too closely. But somehow, he thinks, they manage to come so close to one another anyway.

"Just star polyhedra." she says indulgently. She fastens her arms around his waist.

"The stars hidden from me.." he murmurs, and puts the schematic down on her drafting table. "Ready to go?"

She nods- pressed against him so he can feel it. "Change of plans." she whispers.

He was tired, she thinks, when he came in. Drained by the braying and neighing of the Akatsuki barnyard animals. But now, he's different. Now they have one another's full attention. She was tired too, maybe. Maybe more annoyed than tired. But that was before she watched him, listened to him. It reminds her of how he told her that it was the moment that she took him seriously, she listened to him, accepted his ideas, that gave him the confidence to take them seriously himself.

And she became the planner and architect of that castle of dreams. He was the visionary, the seeker of the higher ideals and higher meanings. And together, she thinks as she rests her cheek against the warmth of his body and the soft fabric of these heavy Akatsuki cloaks, they're constructing something even she can't quite map out. But something maybe like the chrysanthemum she made for him, lavender paper to symbolize the opening of his crown chakra to the million-petalled flower of violet-white light. Symbolizing and speaking for her- _I don't see what you see. But I believe you._

And- _I'll help you._

It's not just his dream anymore. It's not just him being a mess and impractical and... Yahiko, she thinks, would throw his hands up with both of them. _Whatsamatter with you guys? What the _fuck _are you talking about?!_ They've grown together, encouraged one another. Love saves them, but it seems to enable them too. It seems to not protect them against Madara, against that poison apple, the forbidden knowledge, all Nagato's favorite metaphors for it- that _temptation. _Love just gave Madara more ammunition, she thinks.

Made it worse, actually.

But it's too late, it's happening. So Nagato is the one who comes up with the words, the concepts, the fire of the dream. An empire; but he doesn't like this term. A myth and a legend, and a movement; a philosophy that will change the world.

"Remind me." she whispers to him. "It's not an empire. It's not an ideology either..."

"A radical religion of violent peace." he says. "Because nothing else has ever worked." He's let his head fall back against her shoulder. Yahiko's tussled red spikes brush against her neck and jaw. His hands are on her forearms, wrapping her arms around him.

"Like your four dimensional star. Something we can't see yet. But it exists..." he's trailed off, contentedly, as she presses closer. "...nonetheless... mmm.." As her arm shifts fabric over the little stainless steel ring in his right nipple, and he feels it like the distant twinge of his old body, down in the water. "...remind _me_, remind me of why this is possible.."

His voice has become breathless almost, she wants to flatten her hand over his chest, touch him through these heavy clothes. Those piercings are easily sensitive enough for him to feel the pressure, to shiver. His hand has found hers, and is guiding it.

Because it doesn't matter, she thinks, what you use to construct your better world. You can make anything.

And from _nothing_, from a scatter of discarded wastepaper, two terrified war orphans. You could make anything from anything, as long as you knew how to fold and construct it. That was her insight. But the big idea, the nuclear detonation and the gasp of realization from the surviving world- that was all his.

His hand presses hers to his chest, flat-fingered, to his heart maybe. To the hard edge of the piercing that she can feel through the fabric. But she has a better idea, she pulls his cloak open one-handed. Then there's only the thin woven mesh shirt under it, and the warm skin of his muscled chest, the silkiness of the areola. She ignores the piercing for now, strokes the skin around it in a slow circle. Feels him quiver.

"Because we're together." she says quietly. "And because.." But he's turned in her arms, he's lifting her up to the drafting table she's just cleared and returned to it's level angle. "...no, it's not strong enough.. um.. I don't know where..." But he's already decided, he's carried her to her neat, mostly empty desk. They get her desk lamp set safely out of the way, they're beyond enjoying destroying their property at moments like this, replacing it is a hassle. And sometimes they'll take all their clothes off, but today she just shimmies out of her panties and he unbuttons his pants, their cloaks meld them together in a velvet matte sea of black, those vivid red swirls of cloud.

Like the metal swirl of the piercing at the base of his penis against her as he moves, thrusts deeply, rolls his hips against her; the swirl of his rinnegan eyes that are still somehow his and normal and just the same Nagato she's always known. Even this pierced, strange, multi-bodied Nagato. Even this bloodless, papered-over, sectioned version of herself. These Akatsuki cloaks, it's what normal is now. Just his lips soft and the metal in them warmed with his body heat, his arms cradling her, no confusion whatsoever about the name she gasps, and calls for moments later.

No words before that. Sometimes they'll talk, but this time they're silent, she's moving with him, grinding her hips back against him and running her fingers through his hair, squeezing him with her internal muscles before he says anything. It's just their shared broken rhythm of harsh breathing and the patter of rain on the windows, and then-

"Sasori's dead." he gasps. "...the Konoha-nin got him..." She rolls her muscles tightly around him and he groans. She's still fuzzy-headed and limp from the orgasm, not really in any shape to chat. She needs to think that one over a bit anyway. She tightens her muscles, seizes him. Sits up slightly to press her lips to the tight cords in his neck and the streaming current of his pulse.

"...upset?" she manages a moment later.

"...haven't decided yet..." he gasps, his breath hot on her cheek. He's tensing, it will be a matter of seconds. "...but I've been thinking... about the causalities.. the hundreds of millions of people... " His shoulders shudder under her hands. "..and I don't care, I just don't _care_..."

And after all this time, he still tastes like Yahiko when she kisses him, like the trace of Yahiko's sweat clinging to his clothes and the scent of his skin. But his voice is rasped and heated and all Nagato's, even the different tenor of Yahiko's vocal cords has been transformed.

Made into something completely different than either of them were. A composite adult, made of two kids who were too damaged to ever grow up quite right. Or maybe she and Nagato are that composite adult, together.

"I don't care either." she whispers.

"...there's something wrong with us..." he hisses, his back arching, thrusting deep into her, pressing her back against the hard wood surface.

She opens her eyes, sees his closed tightly, his face creased with brief little folds of pleasure in the cold overcast morning light. Watches the last hint of Yahiko vanish from him as he comes.


	3. Staging the Plan

One operation finishes. The Akatsuki organization are the proud new owners of a tailed beast.

It's the operation that never ends, thinks Konan. The endless clean up. The endless reports, Sasori's ring finally retrieved from the rubble of rock debris and smashed puppet pieces, in what was left of the cavern.

The reports come in. At first Nagato is sleeping and she hesitates to wake him; the sealing jutsu takes a lot out of you, even if you do have six bodies. Actually, from what she's seen, having six bodies seems to take something out of him too. Even if he doesn't use them- and quite often he doesn't. He leaves them down in the machine room, like tools neatly put away in a drawer until needed for some specialized task. This is about the only thing he keeps in a neat orderly fashion, in fact. She leans over and kisses him, his still sleeping face. He murmurs in his sleep. But he doesn't wake, he's always been a mercifully heavy sleeper.

So she lets him rest and sits up in bed to be a silent holographic flicker that listens to Zetsu. That's all she has to do, no speaking is required.

It was unplanned, but the fact that she does not speak has now become intentional. The idea of those other Akatsuki members finding out that she's their Leader's.. well, whatever she is, girlfriend, wife, life partner. It doesn't thrill her, that idea. Hidan's mouth is filthy enough without him getting ideas about this, commenting, without him speculating about their sex life. Best that the Akatsuki members have no idea who the ninth shadow is.

When they ask, Nagato's Leader voice comes down on them like an iron fist.

Protecting that secret.

One more for their collection of secrets, she thinks, trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes with one hand, focus on maintaining the hologram, listen to Zetsu; mentally planning what needs to be done for the village today. Nagato's real body hidden in the machines and water is the one true secret, the one stacked on all sides with contingencies, the one with their most intense combined paranoia lavished upon it. But there are others.

There is their identity as village leaders, or rather- Pein's identity. Though Nagato tends to think of _Pein's identity_ as an existential question. Or else one of political efficacy, he seems mildly horrified at the way people respond to this figure. And why is Pein worshiped? Well, it's no mystery to Konan- because Pein is powerful. Pein has more power than anyone else, anyone else in the world. Pein effectively stomps on anyone who comes to bother Amegakure. So their supporters- Pein's supporters really- are in fact motivated by a mix of awe and fear. Mostly fear, though. They're hiding behind the big bully's ankles, kissing his ass so he won't stomp on them too. This is clear to her, but it bothers Nagato. So they don't talk about it. Much.

Pein is not _them_, anyway. Pein is a... not even a means to an end. Not _their _ends, anyway. So much of Pein was Madara's. _Madara's_ idea.

So, not _theirs _at all.

This is irrelevant anyway. There's a village to run. She and Nagato can't run it, certainly not in person, so they have applied the art of delegation. Delegate to others, give them powers to delegate and supervise and soon- all she has to do is supervise the supervisors.

City administration is delegated, primarily, to senior city administrators who hired _new _city administrators from the post-despotic pit that the city was- after Hazou's corpse burnt away. Under them, a chain of civil servants and civil engineers. Nagato sets policy- sometimes, sometimes he delegates it down to a cabinet of ministers. Nagato writes speeches, mostly for civic events and for morale. These are delivered by others, better public speakers than Nagato or herself. Of course, this is not a difficult thing to be. They are shy people, she thinks. Both of them.

Their pyramid of staff has only five people at the top of it. Four of these people have no idea who they send their missives and reports to. The last reports up above their heads through a chain of twenty proxies- and _their _only job is to send those messages along that twisted path. The other four report to this person.

Twenty pairs of hands changing those messages. At the end, any one of them. This person then reports to herself and Nagato. By phone or fax, by delivered message- never in person. She and Nagato take these calls as 'Pein's junior advisors.' Or, if Konan's in a bad mood, 'Pein's PR staff.' No one knows their voices. She and Nagato sound like nothing special, anyway. They sound like middle managers. They own the phone companies the way they own the city utilities. Their ten contact numbers are rendered untraceable. Madara has none of them. Madara isn't allowed to call them.

_Madara would call us at all hours, _Konan thinks to herself. _Madara would give our contact number to Hidan. _Madara would slip their numbers to Itachi, so that some nosy Konoha spy network could come just a bit too close to the bone, give her and Nagato a nice good scare at three in the morning. Nagato says that Madara is like a trickster spirit, like someone in this storied archetypal path. And that's fine, Konan thinks. But you don't give the trickster your _home number. _It's bad enough that the trickster knows where you live.

Thinks he knows where you live.

Hopefully he has no idea where they live, because they really don't live anywhere. She and Nagato watch the proxies deliver Pein's speeches, Sometimes Shakespearian stage actors are hired to do this. They both enjoy that. "I couldn't ask for a better dramatic reading," Nagato says, often, pleased at his words transformed to an impassioned soliloquy.

They watch these speeches from the tower, or else from a safe house. On television, the same as everyone else.

Secure in their anonymity.

The saving grace, Konan thinks, may well be that she and Nagato are such shy, retiring, passive people. When they are in a safe house long enough to be known to their neighbors, inevitably they are thought to be a pair of quiet, slightly eccentric academics.

So, an advantage.

It offsets their looks, anyway. That is where they have a problem. Yahiko's hair is red in the same way fire engines are red. Memorable. Never mind the piercings. Never mind the rinnegan , which is disturbing, strange, rare- and looks every bit of this. Konan should have been luckier, but she's not. She's pretty. But there's pretty, and then there's _pretty_, and she's the kind of pretty that attracts lots of attention. People's heads turn. They stare. It's a big problem, in fact.

It's used against them by even Madara. One of his little cruelties to Nagato. _What unbelievable luck you have had_, his shark's grin. Implying that Nagato should wonder why he has such a beautiful woman, wonder why _someone like him_ should have something- clearly- that Madara feels he is beneath having.

_Which is stupid,_ Konan thinks now, and did then too. Nagato had a pale, delicate, elfin kind of beauty to him, in his own body. It was just Madara insulting his manhood, like every single one of their previous opponents had done. Pausing between calling her a whore and Yahiko a punk to call Nagato a fag- or some variation of such. Madara uses prettier language, but the meaning is the same. Just stupid, pointless trash talk- but it had bothered Nagato.

Bothered _her_. She and Yahiko used to take those people and smash their teeth out on the concrete. Nagato was more of a ninjutsu user- hands off, distanced. So was she, in fact, Yahiko was the taijutsu brawler in their team. But seeing people upset Nagato irritated both of them.

And it was a moot point, anyway. Yahiko grew up to look like a movie star.

Still, a problem. So they use henges. Ordinary looking henges. Ordinary citizens. Henges are fine as long as you don't try to fight, do anything, expend chakra. Henges are fine for going around the corner to the bakery for bagels and fresh orange juice for breakfast. Amegakure is one big wet icy smear in the morning. Miso and rice doesn't cut it, especially after a seventy-two hour sealing.

Konan is thinking all of this as she walks, relatively at ease given that she's out in the open, henged to look unremarkable and everyday. One of the customary wide conical staw hats over her head to keep off the rain. She's long since nodded, gestured- silently dismissed Zetsu.

All of this, she thinks, all these thoughts- and from only the death of Sasori. Not a person she and Nagato knew well, though he had been in the organization for some time. It's probably more that Sasori was their age. Their generation. Orphaned in the same wars that orphaned herself, Nagato and Yahiko. Some of Suna's wars even spilled over into Amegakure, it was a toxic dumping ground for everyone's brutal battles, back in those days.

These days, at least it's peaceful.

Only because the tight borders and intense, heavy-handed policing make it a sincere pain in the ass to come here, try to move your armies in through checkpoints, have your little displaced armed conflict in the pouring rain.

But the city is better too, she notes. Businesses are recovering, or taking root where before there was nothing there, nothing to grow upon, nothing that didn't get bombed or burned or ravaged or picked over by roving gangs, or seized by the local neighborhood warlord...

But now, she can walk down the street and buy food for herself and Nagato without getting attacked, mugged, shot at. Without being greeted by empty shelves and closed signs, because one faction has cut all shipping lines to the city in hopes of starving the other. Without stepping on hidden mines. Without scanning the high dripping concrete eaves of the higher levels for snipers.

_That's something,_ she thinks, the warm bag of bagels under her arm.

She returns to their current safe house, which is much like many of the others- a modest, nondescript but reasonably comfortable apartment. There are people down in the administrative chain who's entire job is maintaining, rotating, securing these places. Thirty of them. Extras in hotel rooms, townhouses, should any of these become too known, too exposed. Nagato is still in bed when she returns, but awake.

Talking to their staff.

"More death threats." he says, putting down the phone. Eighteen this week. Five overnight. Nagato shrugs sleepily. "Only two of them were professionals."

And they lost their trail in the administrative maze, found themselves sending threats and explosives to remote offices.

_Professionals, though._ she thinks.

This is an important distinction. Because there are the usual cranks and crazies that public figures and political leaders attract. Then there are the trained spies and sting operations, the professional assassins and mercenaries that creep in, mostly from the lingering traces of Hanzou's faction. But from other groups as well.

But five is nothing. Five is a normal day.

Nagato pulls her back into bed and they cuddle, almost normal. They have staff to handle the death threats as well.

Staff to handle the day to day operations...

Staff that report up to them, so mostly the two of them end up initialing requests. Their primary job is to _not _exist, to not be there. To be nowhere, untraceable. Pein is in the air molecules of Amegakure, his name is everywhere, his myth moves further still.

But functionally, he doesn't exist. Nagato and Konan eat bagels, drink coffee, make facetious remarks over what's written about Pein in the newspaper, that's always a rich vein of black comedy. They shower and get up properly. Later at the tower they'll put on nail polish; that can't be slapped on in a hurry, should Madara choose to make a sudden appearance. But an Akatsuki cloak can.

So the cloaks tend to be left in closets or over chair backs or thrown across tables, wet and dripping from the rain.

They'll oversee the Akatsuki operation.

But mostly they'll just keep to themselves, her to her origami and chakra geometries, him to his theology and reflection. To themselves, their various obsessions, one another.

They are, she thinks- drawing out her complex figure, mapping it's shapes and lines and distances so that these can then be shaped in paper, in chakra- the _unlikeliest _criminal masterminds ever.

The unlikeliest world conquerors- _ever_.

People more inclined to spend time in a library somewhere than oversee a sweeping global plan of domination. People, in fact, more at home with the idea of this plan, the structure of this plan- than _enacting _this plan.  
_  
Maybe that's why, too._ she thinks.

Maybe that's why Madara chose them.

Nagato has a theory or two about this himself.

_Not right now,_ he thinks. There are other things to think about. Akatsuki is Madara's, it's Madara's bloody thumbprint upon himself and Konan. And upon everyone else in the organization and on their plan. But Nagato still is the leader, or at least the Leader is someone he creates and manifests as real and present.

And Sasori died under the Leader's watch, so in Nagato's opinion, the Leader should show some respect for this sacrifice.

He tries to do this anyway. He tries to keep the members from quarrelling, from tearing one another apart verbally. When Hidan is characteristically disrespectful about Sasori's death, the Leader takes two clean, precise steps and hits Hidan- hard enough to knock him unconscious.

A jutsu, of course. Blunt force trauma probably wouldn't do it for Hidan, he's semi-immortal. Or maybe entirely immortal. He's like Nagato and Konan are that way. Functionally immortal, functionally _very _hard to kill. A rinnegan jutsu is about the only thing that can knock Hidan out cold.

And Hidan learns nothing from this, of course. His big mouth resumes as soon as he wakes up, a few minutes later. But the Leader has made his point.

_No disrespect._ Nagato thinks. Not to the dead. Not to those who die for you. No matter who they are.

Akatsuki belongs to the Leader too.

And- to Nagato and Konan. Though for slightly different end goals than Madara.

Well- _extremely _different end goals, actually.

But this is far off. They have one beast. They have a dead member. Konan takes the reports from Zetsu, and Nagato goes out onto his statue, high on the tower. He stands over the sharp patchy metal forest of Amegakure. Looks up at the thick grey-white clouds hanging heavy over him. Reaches out with Yahiko's rain-senses, his rain sensitivity- _feels_.

Thinks.

Zetsu says that Sasori was killed by two medic-nins.

By two _medics_, thinks Nagato. Medical ninjas. It's ghoulish. Like the ghastly accounts of Orochimaru's human experiments, medical torturers, medics killing Sasori, surgically drilling out any living parts he had left and cutting them to pieces. It's appalling to think about.

Worse, the way they questioned him- at least according to Zetsu. Holding him down, demanding to know his motives, his reasons. Though, Nagato is momentarily more interested in the fact that they _cared _enough to do so. Still, one of them was Sasori's grandmother, an old woman from Suna. And the other was a close friend of the Kazekage.

So, clearly it was personal.  
_  
Someone else's friend is always dying,_ Nagato muses. Down in that city, someone's family is always being killed. Someone is always collapsing with grief. _Always._

And- ultimately medical ninjas would have been the only ones able to kill him. Sasori had replaced almost all of his body with puppet parts.

And Sasori felt the way Nagato does himself, that the world had made him a monster. That the war had broken him internally. And that all he could do from there, all that could ever be right for him-

-was to destroy his own body, twist it, replace it, make it bizarre and gruesome and strange.

_Because we aren't human anymore,_ Nagato thinks, pressing the pad of his thumb to the heavy bar piercings through his nosebridge. Driven to put sharp pieces of metal through himself, hang his flesh on symbolic meathooks. For the pain, yes. For the feeling. For the awareness. For the enlightenment. But no different than Sasori, Sasori and his quiet self-mutilating artistry, not really. No difference other than the tools and materials. The presentation. The aesthetics.

No meaningful difference at all then, Nagato thinks.

_There's a big difference in scale._ Konan says, about this.

With her, it's always about precision. Accuracy.

And usually Nagato is impressed by this, they've always been interested and charmed by one another's ideas. But this time he thinks she's being too harsh. She doesn't like Sasori. She doesn't like anyone in Akatsuki. She _doesn't like Akatsuki. _

_There are two kinds of people in Akatsuki._ she says.

It's so _her_, categories. Clean lines. Demarcated seams of paper. He smiles to himself.

She means the young hotheads- Deidara and Hidan. Kisame. The ones who are going to flame out, quickly and spectacularly.

_And that is right_, Nagato thinks, looking up at the sky. Absolutely right. Every meeting is a struggle to quiet and contain both of them. Every meeting is another moment to look at them and wonder why they're still alive at all. And- for how long.

On the other side are the older ones, the ones that survive and endure and grow more and more self-mutilated, more and more unrecognizable.

And that live a good long time, corkscrewing themselves with bitterness, slowly cutting away their own skin and life and mortality. Like Orochimaru. Like Kakuzu. Like Madara and, in fact, like Sasori. No spectacular self immolation for them, just years and years of slow self-inflicted wounds.

For, that is, himself and Konan.

And not anytime soon, either. They'll live to fifty-something like Orochimaru. To a ghoulish ninety-something like Kakuzu and Madara. Nagato and Konan are still young, relatively, they are only slightly over thirty. But they won't go soon. They'll have years of time to bend themselves into monsters inside and out with their jutsu. They won't go quickly. Not like Sasori, who started as a child, packed all of his slow self-envenomation into an efficient twenty year window. Stepped into a fatal jutsu to finally commit Konoha-aided suicide at the age of thirty five.

_Give it fifty years. _ Nagato thinks. Rain is starting to fall, pattering at his hands. Wet splotches are starting to stain the concrete of the statue's tongue, where he sits. Thinking. Thinking of how they'll look, the two of them. Not like Kakuzu, patched together with black thread. More like Orochimaru, with a thin veneer of cosmetic beauty. Like dolls more than anything. Like ghosts. Konan's paper jutsu will slowly embalm her flesh and freeze her into her youth, set her there like a lacquered butterfly. His own rinnegan will stop the blood and chakra and aging process in Yahiko's body. They'll be like animated sarcophagi, Nagato thinks, inked pharaoh mask-faces. So many of his bodies are already this way. Soon this one will be as well.

The rain is starting to come down hard now. It's bouncing violently from the concrete and pounding at the metal and stone surfaces, lashing down at the buildings thrusting up at his feet, the vast spiked electrical pylon-poles spearing up at the sky; at the tower's wireframed crown, it's lines of tattered color, flags twisting violently in the wind. The air is full and humid and cold, saturated with the hollow thickets of rain sound. Rain on Amegakure.

"Come inside." Konan calls, from the mouth of the statue. He turns and sees her, a graceful figure in shadow under the heavy concrete lip of the door. Her thick Akatsuki cloak covers everything but the crown of her hair, the white droplet of her paper flower ornament, the soft shaded whiteness of her face.

He hears her voice snatched away on the violent gusts of wind. She calls again, but he's heard her.

She calls him by his real name.

Not around Madara, of course. Then he's just Pein. Or rather, both Konan and himself then refer to the god, because the god is all that Madara gets to see anymore. Nagato does not attend those meetings any more than he attends Akatsuki gatherings.

Figuratively, that is.

At any rate, if Madara was there, she would have called for Pein. She calls for _him_.

"You're all wet.." she says, reaching up to smooth his hair off his forehead. He's dripping as he steps under the awning and into the soft humid shadows there. His skin is cold with windburn, he doesn't even notice until he feels the warm touch of her fingers. She wipes a cold line of droplets from his cheek. And then from his lip, playing with one of the studs there with a gentle motion of her thumb.

"Being upset, having compassion, having respect for this man.." she whispers. "puts you above people like Madara. It speaks for your humanity. There _is _something broken in us, but we aren't as broken yet."

And maybe they'll make it out less broken, comparatively. Less flesh wounds, less shrapnel. Less splashback damage onto themselves.

She really is the only one sometimes, he thinks, who values this part of him. Compassion. What amount of it he has left. But it's true that no one else has much use for _Nagato_. Madara calls for Pein, or for the Leader. The Leader is only a hologram. Pein is only power with a thin shell of mythology. And if it wasn't for that power, there would be no Akatsuki cloak, no reason why he would be worth _anything _to Madara. To Akatsuki. Nothing, but for the rinnegan. Only for power.

Power is _all _that matters to these people.

To so much of the world, it seems. And nothing else. Power and money- which is just more power.

Still, he matters to her. And she matters to him. And the rest of the world can flame out tomorrow, Nagato's compassion for it has drained away.

Down into the pipesystems of Amegakure, washed away with the blood of the dead.

It's a cliche in Amegakure to make love in the rain, but they'll do it sometimes. Mostly during the summer, when the sun seeps gold through the heavy mat of cloud. Sometimes the air will be misty and tropical, warm and a hundred percent humidity, prismatic sunshowers. The sky will glow a soft gold light, like an endless sunset; and the buildings will all be neon prickles of color, the water will be flowing all around them, puddled on the stone, breaking into droplets on their skin. That constant surround of soft water falling, trickling, rainfall. Long arches of rainbows in the clouds sometimes. And the person he loves most in the world with him, loving him back.

It's funny that love means nothing, is _worth _nothing, to people like Madara. To much of Akatsuki.

It still means something to Nagato. Pein is another story, but Pein is put away down in the machine room, locked in a weapons case in Nagato's head. It's too cold to do anything outside. So instead they make love under a featherdown quilt and sheets up in the tower. A long grey stormy afternoon. Rain on and off, striking and sheeting at the windows. Drying. Varying pressure up in the clouds. The sound moves thorugh the walls. And they move slowly, stretch the pleasure out slowly.

Slow and unhurried, because they really don't have any pressing village business. Akatsuki is off chasing it's tail and Madara is probably bothering someone else for the moment.

Twelve years, give or take, to learn how to please one another. And both of them could probably write instruction manuals on the subject by now. Hers would be almost mathematical. She is _so _precise, he thinks. _So _precise. The words are a wince of pained delight as she nips him- exactly the right time, place, pressure. The slow torture of her lips on him, her tongue swirling, then the needleprick pinch of her teeth- and he's squirming under her. He's so close but she's stopped, and she's starting again, she's got this down to a hard _science _and all of the time she's doing it, he's thinking about doing the same to her. Flicking her with the smooth round ball stud in his tongue. She's so out of reach of the rest of the world, so distant from it; and so is he, but he's made her scream and lose her composure completely. And right now she's doing the same thing to him. Exactly the same thing...

...exactly.. he thinks, his breath still coming like steam. Clouds of steam. His heartbeat droning, settling. The sweat on his skin cools. Dries. He has her in his arms and he's kissing her, the different softness of her lips and her throat, and her breasts, her nipples, down the tense squirming muscles in her stomach and lower, where the tang of steel mixes with her skin and it's heat. Lower still where all kind of flower metaphors come- _immediately_, he thinks- immediately to mind. Her complex inner folds like her unfolding jutsu, her origami and her elegant theories. The muscles in her thighs tense against his fingers. Two or three hours of this, back and forth. No interruptions. The grey sky begins to give way to wet trails of blue, a hidden sunset that's smothered, hanging low under the jagged pipe forest of the top level skyline. And then finally a deep wet night full of the steady pitch and flow of rain. Long, comfortable hours of deep sleep in her arms. His skin still covered, saturated with the feel of her lips. Still inside her, deep in her warmth and wetness.

Making him wonder, honestly, _what _they are doing with all this Akatsuki scheming, all these power games, all this anger when they could just...

But they always get up. They always let one another go and have to go back into the world, to look at it. See it and it's brutality.

That's when he remembers, Nagato thinks. That's when he feels how much he wants to bash it apart with his bare hands.

All the warmongers. _All _the people drunk on power. All the warmongers drenched and smothered and buried in power until they drown. Until they hang themselves on their own brutal ambitions.

Or lock themselves into strategic checkmate, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they _stop_.

News comes from Madara soon enough. There will be a new member joining Akatsuki.

Konan waits, watching Madara make himself good and rudely comfortable in the room that is not their living room. In the tower where they do not live- but pretend to, stay within to meet with Madara. Because otherwise Madara might figure out that they _don_'t live there- and may come sniffing around their safe houses. Where they have to sneak and henge and switch and wipe fingerprints, to protect themselves from exposure and from the death threats and-

-where they ultimately don't live either. But still, this is something that Madara does not know about.

So they hope.

Nagato sits, his posture more relaxed than usual while being Pein; but his eyes hawklike, his face like a carved mask of a war deity. Madara talks, blusters; the arrogance of this man is just astounding, Konan thinks. The sheer self-regard, the weight of his satisfaction in his cleverness is pushing all the air out of the room like clouds of sweet poisonous smoke. She wants to open the windows and air the place out. She wants to push Madara out of one, in fact. She'd like to tell him to get to the point, say what he's come to say, and leave. She stands, her arms crossed. She doesn't glare at him or even frown... _exactly_.

But she looks. Hard. Steady. Unwavering. Pinning him to the center of her field of vision like she's just stuck a straight pin through his neck. And he's squirming...

But he never does. He's completely unafraid of them.

Madara is going to join Akatsuki.

"Openly, as a member. I'm going to be attending meetings with you all... and I'll get to see you in action.." his tone is light and thick with his arrogance. So thick you choke on it. He's looking at Nagato as he says this. Preparing the next little poison dart on that honey tongue of his, she thinks. Looking at Nagato the way she's looking at _him_.

Madara is going to take Sasori's ring. But this is useless information; these rings are Madara's symbols and Madara's toys, Madara's projections of his diseased inflated ego. She has a recurrent vision of taking hers off and throwing it in his face. His stupid orange mask and it's bloody-rimmed eye. Madara has very little else of note to say. It's time for him to leave.

Meanwhile Zetsu is carrying the Nibi's jinchuuriki to the foot of the sealing statue.

And the plan is proceeding.

Hidan and Kakuzu have caught this jinchuuriki, and Deidara has charged off after the Sanbi.

_Crazy_, she thinks, _absolutely. _But not like Yahiko. Yahiko was a different kind of crazy.

A good kind. But she can't get at that feeling right now, there are too many things to plan and set up and move forward. Deidara and Madara have gone off to try to subdue a beast that even the five nations could not capture. Obviously it would be too much to hope for if, say, it ate one of them. One of them in particular. But- no, Deidara and Madara send word back to Zetsu, who calls for the holograms. And the holograms listen, are told that Deidara and Madara are towing a giant shelled demon back to shore. The process of assembly begins again.

Nagato is in a bad mood, she feels it. The entire hemisphere can probably feel it. He's being disrespected by Hidan. Hidan's having a tantrum because he was called for the ritual just as he had cornered a bunch of Konoha-nin. He was just about to go into his blood frenzy and slaughter them. He whines for another minute, another few minutes- couldn't the Leader just _wait_?

_"No." _ Konan hears Nagato growl in the Leader's voice. "You come to the meeting- _now."_

Kakuzu manages to get Hidan dragged in by the scruff of his neck, kicking and screaming. And then Hidan is off and running at the mouth, leaping at Nagato- testing him. _Hey Leader, fuck you! Man, fuck you! Can't you wait? The good part was just starting! _

And- _Hey man, I just hate all authority, seriously! So fuck you! Fuck _you! _Hey Leader, what're you gonna do, huh? Kill me? _

Good crazy- and _bad _crazy, Konan thinks to herself, watching this. And quite a difference between the two.

Her hologram stands silently and watches from her high stone perch on the statue, watches Nagato crack the whip. Nagato has stalked out to the tower's statueface to deal with Hidan. She is still inside, separate from all of this and holding her silence. She watches with her hologram eyes. Nagato's methods are different from her own. For Hidan and Deidara, he mostly uses reverse psychology. They're both still young enough to respond to it.

To shut Hidan up, Nagato is talking to him.

Answering him, taking his yelling seriously. Konan isn't sure about this strategy at first, but oddly it seems to actually work. Nagato is able to distract him-

-but with Akatsuki's plan. Not the real one, mind you. The _official _one. The public version. Still, she worries, because Nagato likes to talk about his ideas. And the Leader's voice is warming, ever so slightly. Turning less stony and cold and...

She debates stepping in, breaking her silence. The shock of that alone, the sheer breach of normality would probably unsettle the Akatsuki members enough to hijack their attention completely. She listens, curling her fingers slowly around one another, twisting her ring. She could speak, break Nagato's rhetorical flight midsentence, reveal herself- _get him off this subject. _

But he handles it. His voice becomes the Leader's again, hollow blackness. He's deflected the question, muddled it- Nagato can be good and incoherent when he feels like it. Konan listens to him lecture Hidan about economic sabotage, and within a minute Hidan's eyes have begun to glaze over.

"World domination." he intones in the Leader's voice. They all like that answer, she thinks. All of these Akatsuki can fit their goals into that one. Hidan tries to argue the point for a moment more, but even he can't see any problem with that.

There is no problem _there_, she thinks.

Their own goal fits within the penumbra of this official goal as well.

As does Madara's, presumably. Though there is a problem with Madara's goal. A problem with their goal. A problem with reconciling these goals, to be precise.

A problem for later, she thinks.

Madara has donned a new persona as well, this jabbering manic Tobi creature.

_Bad crazy,_ she thinks, with a slight pique of her eyebrow.

The statue quivers, electrifies. It's shackles fall away.

The mask slipping, she thinks. The plan moving. Another completed ritual.

Three tailed beasts, sealed.


	4. Getting it Straight

"For religion, for resources or for ideology," Nagato tells the Akatsuki members. "for love or for spite or _just because_, all are reason enough to start wars."

_Although,_ Nagato thinks now, alone in the darkness of the cavern, long after the end of the six day ritual. _All of these things are my justification. My excuse. And the Konoha will of fire..._

Is something he feels. It's not _will_, though. Not the divine inspiration of previous generations. More a dream, he thinks. An idea. An idea so big, like the power. Too much power for one person, one mind, one pair of hands to hold alone.

_So that person,_ he thinks, _acquires extra sets of hands._

And a benefactor. The question of who's fault it is- all of this- still troubles him, he has to admit.

Or- who's _responsibility_. Is it that he and Konan are just cowed pawns of Madara, frightened children that Madara bullies and controls? No...

_Not that simple._ Nagato thinks. The hologram buzzes around him, little insect-bites of sound and machine whine. And beyond that the darkness and vast underground space, and the little bits of charge in the air, the kicked-up moisture. Yahiko's body can sense that. Even through the hologram.

Opens his eyes on the cold grey daylight of Amegakure.

The question of _why _still seems unsettled for him. Even if, he thinks, he seems to shy away from it. As if it were best not to look too closely. Or because he'd rather not have to know, and understand fully- _and allow_- his real motivations.

It's simple for the Leader, though. The Leader wants to dominate and control the world. The Leader wants, therefore, to destroy the economy and then collapse the governments. The Leader wants to then be the only power around, the biggest king of a pile of wrecked countries.

_Very simple_, Nagato notes. Amegakure buzzes and drips under his feet. Down twenty levels, from the spiretops where he sits, on the pipe hand of his statue. Down to the drainage grates and the flooded roots of the towers, down into the sunken floodplain that Amegakure is bogged into, slowly dissolving away in the rain. Sinking deeper.

It's simple for Pein. Pein does not play political games. Pein has no particular ideology. Pein gets called a demagogue occasionally by journalists, but it's not true; Pein doesn't incite hatred, he doesn't feed lies and propaganda to the public, he doesn't whip them up in a frenzy- at least not intentionally. He simply takes action-Hazou and his entire network are thrown into the fire. Pein doesn't say a single word, rather all of his words are provided by Nagato. Delivered by actors. Conjuring a mystique, but all of that is just the power of myth. And Pein has no reasons or thoughts, so for him it is the simplest of all.  
_  
Not so for me_. Nagato watches the clouds. They are rising in high thick white banks up over the skyline. Their bottoms are heavy and purpled, blistered with water. _I could stay in the mindset of the god, and simply be pure mindless action. _ But he doesn't want that, even when the perfect excuses are presented to him, he still wants to know why. The real reason. The reason that the human being has, the human heart has. Not the god's reasons, which are- _just because he can_. And because he can- _he must._

Still, nothing that complicated, Nagato thinks. Nothing that esoteric.  
_  
For me,_ he thinks, _it's just suffering. We suffered, and it broke us._

And with that suffering came the blinding light, the opening crown chakra, the sudden stroke of lightning and the parting of the heavens, the rinnegan, planted in his flesh like a raindrop striking smooth waters- rippling.

So, the power then. _Given this power, I am therefore chosen to use it._ He turns the Akatsuki ring on his thumb, looks down at it's small circular face. It's raindrop insignia. Konan is right, she's usually right when she says he's investing too much emotion in things. _You're always right when you have something bad to say,_ he teases her, but it's true. This is Madara's symbol. Madara's ring.

Madara's organization.

But his own power. The power belongs- to _him_. Himself and Konan, since he has never fully trusted his own judgment. He looked to her, always, to listen to him, sort him out, make sense of his cloudy, dreamy head full of half-ideas and wisps of vision. The power didn't make him any more certain and decisive. It just gave him more airspace and more torn pieces of cloud. A wider, deeper universe. Just more to look at, and he thinks that even the great theologians never come close to any answers. As they seek the ways and nature of god...

Just more questions. Endless answerless questions to ask himself under a wet Amegakure sky. Asking himself pointlessly at that, because he knows he doesn't really want to look. He knows he really doesn't want to know. He knows he needs all the glorious theatrical lies and alibis from Madara, and the sweep of Madara's magician's cloak. Dazzling him- and with his own power, the rinnegan belongs to _him_. But not the will to use it. That's something conjured by the master illusionist, Madara and his glittering lies. _Like water into wine,_ Nagato thinks. Like the magic justifications. Madara taking him up high over the city, sweeping his arm high and wide. And Madara then looked down at Nagato, and he said- _you're not powerless.  
_  
_Don't you see?_ he said. _You're not powerless anymore._  
_  
So give me the will to use it._ Nagato thinks, his eyes closed now, his shoulders crumpled and his forehead pressed to the shaking nub of his fist. _Give me the courage in my convictions. Give me all those things you said you would. Give me the reason, give me the answers, give me permission._

_And having done that, absolve me._

Their benefactor and their apologist, Nagato thinks, hands to his eyes now, fingers pressing his eyelids shut. Their manipulator and their assailant. Their savior, that much is true- Madara.

Konan has in fact just had yet another visit from Madara. She has handled it herself, Madara does _not _need to see Nagato now. Or rather, Nagato does _not _need to have to deal with Madara, his mood is fragile. She lets Madara in the door. That alone is almost too much for her.

And she was busy anyway, steadying the course for the good ship Akatsuki. Putting out fires in Amegakure's chain of city management. Or reading the reports of fires put out, crises averted. She doesn't mind this work, this is structural and interesting to her. And it lets her be alone. There's only one person she ever wants to see. And she often needs space for herself, even from him. Madara barges in. Well- she lets him in. But if she didn't let him in, he'd ooze in some other way. She no longer bothers with any of the polite niceties. _Oh, it's you. _She doesn't ask him in either, and she knows he's shrewd enough to pick up on all of this.

Madara is full of nothing she wants to hear, as usual. Kakuzu and Hidan were recovering a bounty for Kakuzu, not the six tails like they were supposed to. And Hidan tortured a Konoha team captain before finally killing him. The captain's ninja team ambushed and- in a manner of speaking- killed Hidan. Hidan is immortal, but he is now in a million little exploded pieces deep in a sealed pit on a very remote patch of land. The remaining Konoha-nin cut out all five of Kakuzu's hearts and killed him.

So they're both dead.

So what it _is_, therefore, is that Hidan has not only gotten _himself _killed, he's also gotten _his partner_ killed. This is ever more violent stupidity than Konan expected of him, and she says as much to Nagato. He's out on his statue, thinking. Being somewhere between himself and Pein, likely. His face is white and sculptural in the thin grey light. The clouds are billowing slowly, sagging heavily overhead. The wet wind is stripping the water off the pipes, cold and merciless. There is just enough cloudy white light coming through to make all the wet surfaces harshly bright, as sharp as polished barbed wire. Nagato is shivering, and ignoring it, which is nothing new. She can feel it when she puts her hand on his shoulder. His cheek is ice-cold and wet when he kisses her, nuzzles her. His hands are freezing.

"I suppose your opinion is that we should leave him there.." he's sighing. She's sitting beside him, her hand in both of his now.

That is exactly Konan's opinion.

_He'd just hate us for it if we retrieved him. _ is what she's thinking. _He'd thank us with a spike in the throat._ _He'd lay in his stupid symbol and spout his usual garbage about sacrificing us to his god. More like his ego._ What she says is: "We don't have the time and resources to get him out of there, assuming someone else of Kakuzu's level could be found to sew him back together. If we rescue him, we do it after the plan completes."

"Sensible, as always." Nagato says.

And, as he holds her and strokes her hair as the wind blows it hard off her face, he mutters: "....well, say it. You might as well just do it."

"And he's not Yahiko." Konan says, giving him permission to just let this useless walking temper tantrum go, put his sympathy and emotional energy towards something else. Their other problems. They have plenty: Itachi's younger brother has apparently killed Orochimaru and is now gunning for Itachi- and letting the entire world know it, which is a level of recklessness that gives Konan some pause. Itachi and Kisame are hunting the Yonbi, and that's a delicate operation. Konan is getting a headache again. She has work to do. There are the usual kisses and then Nagato is back to his contemplation of Amegakure policy- which is what he's supposed to be doing, though clearly he's not- and she's back to covering Madara's ass.  
_  
Because we're losing members,_ she thinks, standing over the maps, pen in hand. And mostly to Konoha. She looks over to the wide ragged shape of the Fire Country. This is not really a surprise, Konoha has historically been very strong. It's a young village too, barely over a century old. The shinobi system came from Konoha. Peace and stability- for the five countries- did too. But that only pushed the struggles to the margins, down into the sinking valley of Amegakure. _What's the phrase? _ she thinks, twirling the pen in her fingers idly. _S__hit__ rolls downhill. _ All of the shinobi world's waste waters of conflict drain down to drip though Amegakure. Konoha sent as many problems their way as anyone else.

And not just to Amegakure, to Akatsuki too. Konoha killed Sasori, and now they've killed Hidan and Kakuzu. Konoha is actually being a serious disruption, Konan thinks. The Kyuubi is there. Madara came from Konoha. Itachi came from Konoha. Jiraiya came from Konoha.

And when he was through, he returned there.

_And we stayed here, _ she thinks. _in the sewers, to fight with the other rats, to drown. _ She's getting upset and this is not good. So she takes a break, puts down her pens. Drinks some tea and looks over her designs. This one is meant to be a quick-healing jutsu. It will allow her to not only reconstitute her body, but restore it. Instantly, in a clean shuffle of white paper.

The geometries here are far too complex to draw out completely, so she's mapping a much reduced model. But this one still only has a few hundred cells, a few thousand faces. Even her stellated polyhedron on it's bookshelf, the first elegant model of this theory, is only a hundred and twenty cells. The body is trillions of cells, and even the cellular brickwork of paper is complex and layered and interwoven... There is so much to align there, so many angles. So much to build. So many interesting connections and structures to think about.

She really has to focus on Akatsuki nonsense, but she's getting distracted. Absorbed in the crystalline structure of the jutsu , she picks up her aluminum triangle and maps out the lines. Just a few more, a few hundred. A few pieces of origami paper to quickly fold the most basic atomic level of the shapes, push them through the jutsu, dismantle them, reconstitute. She crumples one in her fist and does the same. It reassembles, perfectly. She smiles. Nagato says this is her angel smile. The one like a carved renaissance statue. Ageless, pale, as pure and indifferent as marble.

Inhuman. She's going to have to do further tests, probably on her arm and hand. The complicated articulation of the fingers is a good test case. She'll put a kunai through the web of her palm, either drag it up through her fingers or down to carve through the knot of wrist bones and then slide through the parallel bones of her arm. The real test will be a wound in her heart, or possibly a deep abdominal slice, something immediately life threatening. But that's for later, when she knows for certain that the jutsu works. The hand is useful too, it's basic ninja strategy to try to injure hands, destroy the ability to form seals, disarm your opponent. But her paper can give her extra hands, extra limbs, she can have as many as those pictures that Nagato likes so much, the Hindu deities with a halo of hundreds of elegant hennaed arms. She can use the jutsu itself to form the seals.

And she'll have to do all of this while Nagato is out dreaming on his statue. He doesn't like seeing her put knives through her body- ironically, she thinks, putting her little finger to the cold ball stud under her lip. Though that's Nagato for you, complicated. Self-contradictory. _I contain multitudes, _he likes to say, paraphrasing Whitman; as usual he prefers a poetic explanation to anything more coldly rational. Death is a subject that reason cannot touch, at least around here, she thinks. Between the two of them, their bad memories and their immortality jutsu. And she'll also have to do something about the blood just in case she can't catch that in the jutsu too, so probably it's best to do this outside. Where Nagato's Pein self can feel everything that's going on. Problematic.

Never mind. Akatsuki business must be taken care of. Hidan and Kakuzu's remaining jinchuuriki will have to be assigned to someone else, probably to Itachi and Kisame. The others will likely have to at least partially be shouldered by herself and Nagato. She scowls faintly. Back to the maps. Back to making things structurally right again, despite the sudden implosion of two of the support staff.

And the intrusion.

Madara comes in person, because being a misery to herself and Nagato is likely one of Madara's great joys in life.

Aside from the fact that he is not allowed to call them or know where they live. Granted, she thinks. But he could send a falcon with a letter. She'd prefer that. She could refuse to answer him then.

But the situation is what it is. They are _stuck. _And they do what anyone mired in an inescapable mess does, they _rationalize. _She is quite aware of it. And Nagato attempts, futilely in Konan's opinion, to have sympathy for Madara. _He lived in war, and grew up in war. He was harmed and consumed by war. He has some excuse for being such a hawk,_ Nagato would say, usually while they were in bed, and they were both feeling good and relaxed. And sentimental, Konan thinks. Too sentimental.

_Madara has nothing but excuses,_ Konan thinks.

And she has her own complicity in this.

There were times when Madara would come to the tower, and Konan would let him in. And she'd watch him waltz in, casting a lazy proprietary eye around- at the tower, at them. His two little underlings. His chess pieces. And so, she consents to opening the door to him, but she draws the line at offering him tea and in fact often has to elbow Nagato from falling into his manners.

For her own part, Konan stays coldly, tersely civil. _Barely _civil at times. But civil. _I think it's time for you to leave, Madara._

Or- _the man you're speaking to has never lost a battle, Madara._ That's one of her favorites. Madara's lost a battle or two in his time, most prominently to the Konoha Kage almost a century earlier. This is why Madara is a countryless wanderer now, and why he hides himself in the Akatsuki organization. And why she and Nagato are necessary, Konan thinks. Camouflage. Dupes. People close, but not too close. People to stand in the light and be his figureheads. People to be visible. When the axe falls, it won't be on Madara's head. People to take the fall for him, Konan thinks. People in Akatsuki are already taking that fall.

And why he's endlessly raving about his sharingan eye. Which frankly, Konan has seen, mapped for it's chakra geometry- and so far has yet to witness any of it's alleged breathlessly celebrated grandeur. She's not very impressed by eye techniques, it's the higher order jutsus that are really interesting. Even Nagato's rinnegan is like a delicate, powerful optical tool to peer into them for her. But only a tool. And Madara's sharingan is a construct of bloodied seams and jury-rigged parts. It's like the electrical grid of Amegakure, prone to overcharging and shorting parts of itself out. Madara is full of disgusting stories about how he fed it blood and body parts, eyes ripped out of the heads of his own relatives. And while Nagato feels that this is mostly Madara speaking metaphorically- theatrically, as always- Konan takes him at his word. Madara has had a long career of slaughtering everything around him, everything he ever touched. And he's touched them, touched herself and Nagato, shaped them into something he owns, at least partly. Madara's bloody fingerprints are all over them, now. He's had his hands on them for _fifteen years._  
_  
We'll be just like him someday,_ Nagato says, sometimes. When his depression is particularly bad.

Not if Konan can help it. She tolerates this man. Barely. She lets him know it. Madara is still a sore loser about that defeat, those other defeats, all those other people who have put him back in the garbage heap of history- where he belongs. So Konan twists the knife a little. And Madara inflicts little emotional flesh wounds on Nagato. Because Nagato is a softer target; and Madara knows that both Nagato and Konan know this, they know that _he _knows it, multiplies the psychological cruelty of it, and smiles his innocent little charming smile, and keeps doing it. Over and over...

And Konan stands, silent, tense, suddenly inflamed by a recurrent vision, a crystal clear picture of herself slapping Madara's hand off Nagato's shoulder, slapping Madara's stupid orange mask off his face, standing over him just beside herself with fury- _get out! Get out! Get OUT of my house! Get away from him! Leave us alone!_

And never does it.

Madara came with news of Hidan and Kakuzu, and Konan listened, nodded, showed him out. Same as always.  
_  
We always do that,_ she thinks.

_We always do nothing._

A recent example, she thinks with cool distaste. The death of this Akatsuki footsoldier Sasori. She and Nagato both think it's wrong for Sasori to die and rot alone in that cavern, and for the Akatsuki members to snicker over his corpse. It bothers him, it offends her in some more intangible way. But they say nothing, Sasori's empty puppet shell is still there, two swords through it's heart like a marionette with a pair of scissors stuck in it's back.

Nagato weighs and ponders and dwells on their motivations, on Madara's, on where this is all going. She does the same, and they both agree that they should get away from Madara before he does the same thing he's done to every other person _ever _involved with him, before he finally gets around to doing it to _them_.

Knowing this. And still, they do Madara's bidding, they brush off Madara's insults, they take Madara's orders.

Konan stews and glares and imagines paper slicing open the soft parts of Madara's face- but opens the door for him. Lets him sit down. Listens. Nagato falls further into his fascination with transmigration and Konan turns herself a bit more into a geometric construction and they do nothing. They love one another and they're probably going to get burnt and consumed by the detonation of this plan, but they keep going. They know that Madara must have a final step to dispose of them once the beasts are collected, a way to get rid of his last little newly inconvenient dupe- they do nothing. They do _nothing _to stop it. They just can't save themselves.

Right now, Nagato is outside probably considering whether Madara's last cruel little insult was partially their fault, or something they deserve karmatically. Right now she's drinking tea and drawing a hypershape for a new jutsu. Considering reassigning the six-tails. Considering whether she and Nagato should have any wine that night, if they'll likely need to be clearheaded come morning, if any holy hell will go down in Amegakure or in Akatsuki and....

_We were always this way._ she thinks. _There is no mystery here._

Always. Yahiko was the person of action. She and Nagato were quiet, bookish children. Cringing shadows at the neighborhood houses where the children were gathered, because there was some raid, or some attack, or some fighting moving into the area, and the adults and older kids had to go and try to do something about it. Her mother was gone- long gone- by then, run off with some other man. And her father was an engineer, off trying to help the city keep itself from being blasted apart. She was already alone by then, already acid and cynical, at least in her own mind. People patted her shoulder and called her a sweet little girl, she looked right through them. But she was sweet, she was kind; certainly in comparison to the way she is now. Nagato was soft and teary, but she already felt she was all hard angles inside. How old were they then? Five.

Nagato's mother was a medic, and not a military one, not a ninja, just a normal doctor. His father was a mid-level bureaucrat and Nagato said they used to have parties, they were wannabe intelligensia. They had one child, much like Konan's parents, that they weren't much interested in. Konan's father had never had much time for his wife, much less his daughter. And Nagato's parents were like the intellectuals in any war- saying outrageous things and listening to poetry and music in their salons, but when the fighting broke through they died like everyone else. Konan and Nagato were semi-friends at the places where the children were left to be guarded by the adults too old to do anything else They were both too shy to really talk. But they both didn't like the other kids. They didn't want to watch the war on television or play board games, or whine about their parents being busy. They didn't want to pester the elders watching them for cookies and juice. They were alone. That was the first reason they were together. Konan learned origami from one of the elderly men, someone else's grandfather. It was meant to keep her busy, keep Nagato from crying so much. So she made him a crane. Her first one. She had an idea back then that she could make one for her father too. Stupid, really. Her father would have thrown it out.

These were the kind of plans they made. In retrospect, she thinks that they had nothing better to do, there were no interesting books around, the schools had all been shut down, either bombed to pieces or become to attractive as targets for the same. Or for hostage takers. They weren't normal kids. And he was so sad, so she made him a crane. And he wiped his eyes, and picked it up to look at it.

He couldn't tell her what was bothering him any more than she could tell him why the folds and angles of the paper wings were so amazing to her. That was all right, they understood one another in an instant way. There was no one else. There was only their absent parents, and if Konan's father wouldn't want anyone to come and see him, then Nagato said maybe they could go visit his father at the city hall offices when the fighting wasn't so bad.

But then Nagato's father was killed when the city center was torn apart. Then his mother was gone too, the hospital attacked and everyone butchered, the doctors dying, their throats freshly cut, falling over the patients they were trying to shield. There was no one else left. So Konan took Nagato's hand and had a plan to go find her father. But her father was gone. Where? No one knew. And finally it turned out that he had been part of some Amegakure underground insurgent group. His cell was exposed and all members were lined up and killed. And then they were alone, Nagato and herself. How old were they then? Six.

They ran away from that neighborhood house. The neighborhood was falling apart, drowning in the tide of fighting then only ten or twenty blocks away. Sooner or later the forces would wander through looking to loot for supplies and ammunition and find the houses where the old and the children were stashed, kill them all, burn the house with the bodies in it. The elders were going out to fight, and most of them weren't coming back. She and Nagato ran off, it was the only time they did anything. Taking action only when pushed into it. And running off to nowhere.  
_  
It was like we were rats jumping a sinking ship,_ she thinks. _Crazed. __We knew it was over._ Soon the soldiers would come and then they would both die like Nagato's mother. Children were getting impaled on sharpened street sign poles and roasted over fires, the newscasters were losing their composure, the elders were hollering for the televisions to be turned off, the children were whining less and starting to get silent and terrified. Something possessed her and Nagato. They waited for the others to sleep, then they ran.

They ran and they were cold and hungry, afraid of the endless rainy night full of darkness and echoing sounds. And distant explosions. And the dead and dying, the headless corpses in the gutters. What food they could scrape up, but so little because everyone was looting by then. And they were tiny children, unable to fight for anything. Mostly just good at hiding. They found an apple tree in the stone debris of what had been someone's back yard. It was autumn. Cold. But the fruit was still there, and not so badly rotten. That got them through a day or two. But not so many days, at most they were out and alone for a week. Likely hypothermia would have gotten them as soon as the season turned, just one good frosty night out in the freezing rain and they would have never woken up. They'd be another pair of small bodies decomposing away in the soggy muck of the city.

Had Yahiko not found them.

_We owe him everything, _Nagato says, often. _We owe him our lives, and the time we have with one another, and everything we do now. We see his dream through. _

They see through his dream of vengeance.

Or maybe that's not quite the word, she thinks. Yahiko was different, very different from herself and Nagato. He had staunch parents, salt of the earth people who hung Amegakure flags and stockpiled weapons. A bunch of older siblings who were in various militia groups. He wasn't at the places where the children were hid because he was off helping his brothers and sisters. He was six, but he _refused _to go.

Gutsy, she thinks. Willful. That was Yahiko. Yahiko up in the towertops, up in the blinding wet sunlight from the storm he'd just kicked apart. Kicking the puddles and howling his triumphant joy at the sky. _Hey! I did it! I did it! The rain stopped! We don't have to just take this! We don't have to take anything!_ Yahiko up in the direct glare of the sun, his hair flaming orange and gold and- _no_, now Konan is crying. This is not the sort of thing she does. Not even Nagato cries, not anymore. She wipes her eyes. She shuffles her skin into paper and back. No marks then. No swelling, no wetness. No swollen eyes. Done, and through with. Yahiko never liked it when anyone cried.

_Tough, _she thinks. Always. Tough and friendly. He found them in that backyard with the apple tree. _Hey, you guys can come out. It's just me. I'm a kid too. _He was like that, sure of himself. Like he was your friend already.

But you couldn't really say he was an intellectual, not like herself and Nagato. When they had a plan about saving their money, maybe trying to get out of Amegakure and getting into one of the universities out in the surrounding countries, Yahiko said that was fine. He was excited for them; he said he'd come too, take ninja work and help them pay for their tuition. But he wasn't like them, wondering endlessly. His views were set. Wrong and right. Simple, direct ideas about how things should be, how things should be handled, what the three of them should do. And because of that, because of his courage, he was always their leader. Always.

And they followed. Yahiko took charge, and they helped him, and they were better off for it. Yahiko found food, he found dry places to sleep. He found paper and pencils, and books for Nagato, and in the wasteland of butchered families and moving armies and demolished houses, he found them a protector and teacher. He found them Jiraiya.

And after Jiraiya...

They were the gang of three. They were a faceless menace. Demon children. Yahiko's rules were simple. They worked together. They watched one another's back. If anyone messed with _any _of them, the other two would find that person and kill them. Yahiko didn't play around. _Hit 'em hard, make 'em remember,_ he said. _Show them we mean it. _

When their various enemies finally got a look at him, they usually opted to mess with either the girl or the pale shy boy instead. And then Konan and Yahiko- or Nagato and Yahiko- would go out, just like it was an assassination contract. Find that person. And sometimes they'd hang the severed head on the pipeworks, or leave the body on it's former doorstep; and very, _very _quickly, they had themselves quite the _reputation_. Wild children like feral cats in the rubble of the city. Best left alone.

How old were they then? Fifteen or sixteen. A few years after Jiraiya, and in fact more or less the same age as this Uchiha Sasuke. And like him, Konan thinks- too much power and too little maturity to temper it. They were very blatant in those days. They had no restraint. Yahiko never saw much point in grey areas, half-measures. _Eye for an eye,_ he said. _We kill 'em and then we think about peace. _ He thought the origami was kind of neat, but he didn't really understand it. He'd listen to Nagato talk about human nature and meaning of existence for about five minutes; and then he'd say: _think about that stuff later. Do what you've got to do, then think. Then wonder. You guys need to get it straight._

And later on Nagato would say, _I wonder if he's with us right now._ Wondering if Yahiko was haunting them, standing right in front of them, screaming his invisible ghost lungs out at them. _Get it straight! Come on!_ Don't get so tangled up in thinking. Do what you've got to- protect yourselves. _Geez, you guys, come on!  
_  
But Nagato has since decided that ghosts likely don't exist- and if they do, they no longer count as self-aware entities. And Konan has never had much use for anything she can't put on graph paper or break down to folds and creases. Maybe if ghosts had energy, chakra , something Nagato could see and describe to her, that she could deconstruct down to lines and angles. But they don't. If they do, if they exist, neither of them has ever seen one. Some people in their line of work go crazy- _crazier, _really- and become convinced that their victims are haunting them. But this has never happened to Nagato or herself.

But sometimes Konan does notice her protractor or her pencils moving around her study overnight. She sees the static rippling over Amegakure, the deep unearthly howl of the raging wind, and she wonders. She tells Nagato, who looks disturbed and thinks, but never comes to any kind of conclusion he's happy with. They go forward. Alone. Together. In love. Busy. A great far-sweeping plan of world domination. Madara breathing down their necks. Nagato putting another sharp piece of metal into his face. Konan finding yet another cellular level of her heart to freeze-dry, model, map and turn to cold architectures of paper.

It wouldn't be this way if Yahiko were there. They both agree on that.  
_  
Yahiko, never compromising._ she thinks. Would he want this? Akatsuki, obviously, is a bad idea. But the rest? Not the thin official justification of world domination, but the real plan. The real idea. Would he want it? Would he be here with them right now- probably kicking Madara in the face and cussing him out. Wrestling Madara to the ground and twisting his arm back for insulting Nagato- _you take that back! You __take that back right now you son of a bitch__ or I'll really hurt you!_ But helping. An Akatsuki ring on his finger and a cloak on his back. Going along with this. The way she and Nagato are. Doing something to change the world.

Or maybe he'd be like Jiraiya is- probably- now. Because Akatsuki is gnawing little holes into Konoha and it's ninja, and somewhere Jiraiya must wonder if he should not have just let those three kids starve to death. Or freeze to death. Or get raped and killed by some roving band of AWOL soldiers, fed to packs of wild dogs for a laugh, something like that. There were plenty of people like that running around, people driven mad or bored or too desensitized to care anymore. Just another bunch of orphan brats. If Jiraiya knew, wouldn't he choose to let the future mass murderers die in the mud as helpless children?

And if Yahiko could know what they're up to now, would he do what he did?

This is hard for her to say.

This is more Nagato's sort of question. And he isn't sure. He doubts himself too much, Konan thinks. And she gets too distracted by the lines and angles, the structures, the parameters of the plan. Both of them lose the plot.

This is exactly what Yahiko would say. _Both of you guys, get with it!_ Yahiko wasn't brainy, not like she and Nagato are. But he was smart, clever- _savvy _is the word. She and Nagato were never savvy, never wise to the ways of the world. For all Yahiko's disinterest in studying, she thinks, he had an adamantine canniness to him. He knew where to hide and where to steal food and when it was safe to move under cover of darkness. And which people could- probably- be trusted, who had to be avoided completely. He had no fear of the gangs or the soldiers, _you guys be quiet and they won't see us,_ he would say. And they never did.

He said- _Hey you guys, come out! He's not a bad guy!_ And Jiraiya wasn't.

He said- _I'm gonna save you both! Nagato, do it! These guys can take me instead._

And- _I said I'd save you. Now it's my turn.  
_


	5. Metrics of Power

It _is _madness. Konan's aware of that. Doing what they're doing.

Which is- not to mince words- take over the world. Which is- _actually- _something else entirely, that's just the cover story. Is it funny that lusting after power and control on a global scale is somehow more acceptable than...

...what they _really _want? What this is all _really _for?

Or maybe it's just more common to want power for it's own sake, she thinks. It's a more prosaic goal for a would-be demagogue. Though from what Nagato has said, most of the demagogues of the past thought they were doing good. Or at least pretended to think they were. Or maybe they actually believed it, were convinced of their own rightness, bought their own press. Vainglorious fanatics. Or because they were ideologues. Or both at once, the faith _and _the ego in a toxic combination of explosive personality. Where are she and Nagato on that axis? Nowhere, they pretend to want to take over the world.

Because it makes sense. It makes sense to someone with Hidan's attention span. Their theological pretensions only make it more convincing. Saving the world by destroying it. Even Hitler thought of himself as a savior.

Not that it's a _bad _idea, mind you, taking over the world.

There's something appealing in it's grandiose scale. Terrify the world and burn nuclear holes into it. They did this when they were with Yahiko anyway, on a smaller scale, with matches and razors and dismembered body parts and their own near-fatal arrogance. And they were just dumb kids, at that. Seventeen when it ended. They played at being demons. Now they really _are _supernatural. On some level; Madara's theological costumes for them aside, the rinnegan _is _very real. And so is what it can do.

Violent change. Accomplished swiftly and brutally, marks left on the record of history with blood. Indelible. More so than any quiet revolution, any gentle nonviolent methods. Fighting fire with fire, war with more war and a bigger death count, a deeper bloodbath, it seems crazy. It _is _crazy. But crazy seems to be the only thing that works, the only thing that moves nations. The wars are started by madman anyway... and all of this is just pointless, she doesn't believe in it. These reasons. She only has one reason. She observes the irony, bloodless as she is, her thoughts like neatly divided sections of paper. The ringleaders and instigators, the catalysts and demagogues, they always claimed an altruistic motivation. Very few of them flatly admitted they were out for greed and power.

So she and Nagato are unique in that sense. Doubly unique, since world domination is only their stated goal, their false goal to tell a squirrelly Akatsuki foot soldier who probably couldn't get his head around anything more complex. It's not what they're _really _out for, is it?

So, a beautiful madness.

Both of them now so bound up with Madara that they probably couldn't get away from him if they tried. Couldn't stop this even if they wanted to. All that pure weapons-grade _power _in their hands is prone to gigantism, to puffing up into sulfurous clouds, into a brutally efficient self-assembling war machine. And it has no off switch.

So a plan that neither of them could actually picture _happening_, coming true, is proceeding.

There are nine beasts, Itachi and Kisame are out hunting the fourth. They are not even at the halfway point of their capture operation. But yet, it's too late. It's really too late. If Konan were to tear off her ring right now, throw her cloak in Madara's face...

...no, they could never be allowed to just walk away. They are accomplices and they are witnesses, they know too much. Either they stay and play their part or she's dead, Nagato's dead, Madara will see them both, what's the word...?

Neutralized.

Silenced. One way or another. Either stay and take the money and the place to live, the tidy justifications, the reason for living- or take a death sentence. A very Madara-like choice, she thinks. Essentially his cardinal plan that he seems to offer to all his dupes. She remembers when he was blackmailing Deidara, and she only heard the story through Madara's overblown, exaggerated retelling. But they went to Deidara's workshop, they dragged him out. They gave him the choice and really...

...now all these dupes are dying, aren't they? Hidan and Kakuzu are dead. It's as if these ground-level Akatsuki members were meant to die in the process of acquiring the beasts. It's part of the elegant design of Madara's plan. Killed before they become inconvenient. And while she and Nagato still are useful to Madara, still are worth more to his plan alive than dead...

...they won't be when it's time to take the prize. And when their goal differs from his. And when Madara, old enough to have seen the century turn, certainly won't be in the mood to share his superweapon with two angry, aging overgrown children...

Who will, instead, get drawn down into the flying gears of the plan's machinery, crushed and ground up and disposed of just as their continued survival would become inconvenient.

So the Akatsuki members are dying. There are five beasts left, and they only have so many hunting teams. Only Itachi and Kisame, Deidara and Madara now. Madara has revealed himself and that means a new phase of the plan is in effect.

And Konan really should do something about this, protect herself and Nagato somehow.

And she doesn't disagree with this, she's all for the idea of somehow.. successfully double-crossing or escaping or somehow just defusing Madara as a threat. Fading off into the wet, blearily orange flame of Amegakure's sunset, with the superweapon or without, just with their goal accomplished, just with some pound of flesh extracted from the world. That would be enough, really, for her.

Sometimes she thinks it would be.

But instead she's sitting in a henge that looks more like a middle-aged librarian, or maybe some sort of accountant. She's drinking an overpriced and overcomplicated coffee drink in one of Amegakure's shiny new citizen-owned businesses. Thinking about killing Madara or just getting rid of Madara- which amounts to taking a magic wand to reality, because they are sunken in deep now, herself and Nagato, they can't save themselves. Thinking that and when she goes back to the tower she'll find Nagato and they'll worry about Amegakure business for the day. She'll make a decision about whether Deidara and 'Tobi' should be chasing the six-tails or the five-tails. She'll get to drawing a stellated polyhedron and forget about everything else, because the beauty of it's geometric symmetry will be so compelling...

And her rapid self-healing jutsu is coming together nicely. Something for when Madara finally has his finger on the trap door button, finally takes the time to put the dagger in their backs. Something for her, and also something for Nagato, should Madara try to unplug Pein's life support, try to somehow lock Nagato into Yahiko's body, or back to his old one. Something for her to construct a new body for him, for both of them, a paper simulacrum, if necessary. Just enough for them to flee, to buy them some time when it finally all goes to Madara's endgame. When Nagato is finished writing his speech, she'll ask him to help her work on building something that will synchronize nicely with his rinnegan.

Which can possess anything, it seems, any flat, preserved body. Anything. Nagato has some interesting commentary on that, stories of the Dead Sea Scrolls and ghoulish tales of golems, lifeless created bodies that could then be marked with a symbol, brought to life. The ripple of the rinnegan, he says, reaches out to all his bodies and links them, animates them. And while Madara provided the machinery and the first theological excuse, the catalyst...

...so much of this now is their work, their ideas. Their operation.

Their goal. They couldn't let that go now, couldn't turn their back on it. It isn't Madara with a gun to their heads, or the veiled threat of just eliminating them as AWOL soldiers. It's his most potent weapon of all, what _they _want. What they're afraid to want. What they want and just don't want to _admit they want it._

Madara always has excuses, she thinks. Madara has the best excuses, and once you do his bidding he'll be happy to give you some of your very own.

Nagato is out on the statue when she gets back to the tower, sitting in the rain, his cloak slowly soaking through to a deeper velveteen wet black, a rich wet red. Not inside writing his speech. The weather is a slow drip, his indecision splashed over the landscape in patchy showers and a deep fissure in the clouds. Konan locks herself away in her study with a fresh cup of coffee, the stellations and the angles, the things that don't trouble her. Thinks about something else for a while.

Nagato is moping.

Or maybe brooding. Maybe that's a better word, he thinks. Examines his bad mood to see which one fits. There _is _a difference.

There is something else he's supposed to be doing.

But instead he's brooding, outside under the wet open eye of Amegakure's sky. A big crack down the middle of it, blue-black clouds deep in it's crooked well. The stone is drying as the water falls away down through the pipeworks, so Nagato lies back in the statue's cupped hand, steam from the tower's furnace rising in a slow curl from the mouth of the statue's pipe. The machinery hums under him.

He has Pein business to take care of, but he can't stop thinking about Yahiko. And maybe this is appropriate, he thinks. As his thoughts come into focus, moisture weaves together and rain begins to prickle at his upturned face.

Yahiko's face.

The gift of this life and this body, and it's greater ability to bear the sheer physical stress of the rinnegan. Really, he thinks, it was Yahiko who unlocked the door to all that power. Who set it in Nagato's hands.

And made one request.

His heart's desire, Nagato thinks. The one thing he really wanted; after going through such a determined flight of materialism and avarice, of hedonism like Yahiko needed to burn through all of that, all the things he'd never been able to have, just so he could finally boil down to what really mattered to him.

And that's why he did it.

Funny, given how unserious Yahiko tried to be, though. In everything else. Yahiko was dead serious about protecting them and surviving, but everything else was a game to him, a thrill. Even their work. Wetwork, that was the name for it.

Especially that, really.

It was a joke to Yahiko. Maybe that isn't the right word either. It was a costume, a mask, an assumed false identity. Demons.

Doing the dirtiest work imaginable. Washing their hands clean after. Turning back into themselves.

No remorse. Morality is a funny thing, in Nagato's opinion.

He has always despised Nietzsche's philosophy, but so much of it is applicable now...

...to Pein, who is so powerful that he is beyond suffering, beyond joy, and in fact seemingly beyond morality itself. His power levels the world around him. Everything is made so small and insignificant. His power warps the meaning of everything. Morality becomes meaningless.

Morality becomes nonfunctional. Because people could indeed decide to view Pein as a monster. They could fear him, or better- they could try to oppose him, or hate him, or somehow try to drive him from Amegakure. There's a word Nagato is looking for, the word for getting rid of Pein. Not _evicted, _since Pein is not something physically present. Ah, he's got it. Exorcized.

But people could try to exorcise Pein all they wanted. Pein would merely blow them away, a wave of his had. Magic. _Now you see it, now you don't. _Yahiko would say, the mission orders in his hand. The flick of his lighter. Burning little pieces out of Hanzou's operation. Pein was like that on a grander scale, a fire that could consume an entire city. And worse, Pein wouldn't think twice; Nagato has noticed that Pein, the Pein frame of mind, is _tremendously _single-minded. Morality does not apply to him.

It cannot touch him.

Morality still troubles Nagato, obviously, because Nagato is pacing around his study now. He is having to actually put papers away so he has room to do this. Paper everywhere, Konan's elegant deconstruction of her body. Well, never mind. That's a good thought, that a thought that reminds him of her, of being happy and dizzily in love. Which he is. Which Pein does not know, and in fact is constitutively _incapable _of feeling. But Nagato does, Nagato has always been good at feeling things too much and too heavily and wailing with sorrow about it. He'd think that all this overblown emotion would translate into a nice fiery speech for Pein, but the words are _not _coming and right now Nagato is actually really angry, right now he doesn't _want _to be happy. _Yes_, he wallows in his misery, he thinks, kicking a stack of scrolls aside. And yes, he enjoys it. Pain. It's contradictory pleasure. Why take the name otherwise? His thoughts are so global, so disorganized that there are papers covering all the shelves and the desk and stacks of scrolls on the floor and a whole series of plans for the bijuu weapon spread all over the sofa against the far wall. He sweeps the papers off the sofa cushions and throws himself down upon it.

Dramatically, he thinks. Pein is a _drama queen. _Or rather, Nagato is. Yahiko said so- with affection and good humor, with his teasing smile- but he still said it, and anyway, it's true.

Nagato doesn't like it, the way the press picks at him, at his motives, the way these self-righteous journalists criticize him. The way Madara does too, but it's so much easier to just spit this venom at an impersonal target. Strangers writing columns.

Fine- the way they criticize _Pein. _Fine. There is a difference.

The way others just accept Pein uncritically, worship at his feet, at his bloody footprints left dissolving in the rain, the way the entire city will tune in to watch this speech. And Nagato will too, safe and distanced at home watching the actor on television. Watching this disgusting raw adoration of _power. _

_We do it, _Konan says to him when he gets like this. _because it works. It's the only thing that works._

Brutality. Why use the tactics otherwise? When his own family was killed- yes, brutally. He heard the stories about his mother. He saw the news report. He _knows _the sick feeling of terror and paralysis, being at the mercy of a mass killer. Hanzou. Or the relatively disorganized mess of warring factions in the city before that.

Never mind the details. Never mind who it is, which faction leader, what flamboyant name he's given himself. You would assume that people would be horrified by such a force. A monster. A _mass murderer. _And to most people in this city, it just doesn't matter. The rules for Pein are different. He can murder with impunity and still be above reproach. Still be worshipped.

And he _is _worshipped. Nagato can't get over it. He looks at the paper in fresh incredulity every day. It's certainly not that he was ever a starry-eyed idealist, rather he spent the first part of his life crying constantly _because _the world was so horrible and full of people determined to hurt others. Like those mercenaries that came into the hospital, killed all the doctors.

With machetes.

Before chopping up the patients too. Maybe some of them were killed by jutsus as well. There are many creative ways to kill people with ninjtusu. A very easy kill, from what the warlords said after. When they released comment, when they claimed responsibility. When still no one did anything, Amegakure continued to kick and flail and drown in it's own blood. It's throat cut. And it's the weak, after all, who are sick, who are wounded, and who try to protect others. Nietzsche was very sanguine on the concept of only the weak valuing protecting others. Of how the strong rightly believe the weak should be exploited or killed, that they deserve what they get. And while there's more to it than that, more nuance to the theory perhaps, Nagato finds it too infuriating, too maddening mirrored in reality. Pein's reflection in the puddles at his feet. Hanzou, admired because he was powerful, unbeatable, fascinating even to Yahiko, who needed something to vent his frustration upon. Because he was merciless.

_There is nothing new about this. _Konan says.

But Nagato still can't quite _stop _being amazed by it.

Or being angry about it, for that matter. Not that he's even known quite what to do with that anger. Other than swallow it and weep. Saying nasty things to the newspaper is about his limit. And he hasn't cried in years, so...

He has one solution and he doesn't know what to do with it, half the time. Pein's perfect theological alibi, his magic circle of a tautology- _whatever a god thinks or does is automatically right, whatever I do or think is the act of a god. _Madara's poison apple, his sweet promises, his devil's smile.

And the two of them as innocent and naive as children lost in the woods, in the dark garden of Amegakure where children were bayoneted in the streets. Taken by the hand.

Both of them. Madara took them up to the heights of the city, up to the tops of Amegakure's towering spiral of pipes. Up to the tallest building, in fact. Hanzou owned it. The guards were dazed by a red flash of Madara's sharingan. Then he took the two of them, Nagato and Konan, to the edge.

He said- _You're not powerless anymore. _

He said they would never again be helpless children in the muddy rain. He said too that they would no longer be part of the moveable slaughterhouse down there, killing so they wouldn't be killed, struggling to keep afloat, to keep their heads above water. They would transcend all of this, and it would never happen to them again, they would never lose what they had just lost. They would become impervious to death.

Because of the rinnegan.

Power. Nothing more grand or complicated than that. Madara took Nagato by the shoulders and looked into his eyes, and his sharingan was like a fresh wet droplet of blood. Made them both come very close to the lip of the building, to look down into the dripping abyss that plunged a hundred stories to the top street level, and then fell through another twenty sunken into the soggy land underneath it, down to the water. Hundreds of thousands of dead people there, a lifetime of murder flushed down into Amegakure's underpinning of pipes, bodies dumped and weighted to vanish into the water, bones speckled through the bog and moss at the city's thick stained concrete roots.

Madara made them look and told them to think about what was going on in the city, what had happened, what had been done to them. And by who. _Hanzou, was it? _Madara said lightly. _His forces, wasn't it? That killed your friend? _And to think of that and think of how it made them feel, and think of the power they had now. And put those thoughts together, dry their eyes...

"Then look," Madara said, sweeping his arm high and over the city. His flair for the dramatic. "See for yourself, and don't turn away. Look and _see, _and get angry, Nagato. And then- _do something about it."_

And outside, in the square divided windowpane sky Nagato can see from where he lies, sprawled messily and sulking, the clouds are bursting open. The blue underneath is pale, streaked with faint peach and pink reflections from the sun, which is setting somewhere under the heavy grey clouds clumping like cotton battening in the west.

The clarity, he thinks, came with the power. The power was like a flaming sword, lighting up the world for him, showing him the way...

He gets up. Runs a hand through Yahiko's hair, it's reassuring unruliness, the solid reliable strength of Yahiko's body.

He has a speech to write, just because it's getting colder as fall turns towards winter, as Amegakure's economy freezes and breaks down, as Nagato starts to get the feeling that the time is right, Pein's voice is needed. He clears off his desk and sits down.

He supposes... yes, that he can see the appeal. The comfort of having a god that cares about you, and will take care of you. And Pein is very prompt, as gods go. He gets results. He reads the newspapers and listens to the administrative chain so he can find out what the people need and make it happen for them. Or at least Nagato does, Nagato puts Pein out on the world stage. He writes Pein's lines and dresses Pein in his costumes and stage makeup, directs Pein from the shadows where no one can find him. And honestly, he thinks, no one would ever believe that someone like him could have anything to do with it. Someone like him... that old fiendishly simple and clever insult of Madara's, his genteel sneer- _someone like you. _Someone like Nagato with _all this power..._

So Pein will make a speech to reassure the public. Tell them about Pein's plan to fix this economic problem, and make things easier for them over the winter, make them feel watched over and protected. Not that Pein actually has a plan yet, Nagato still has to figure out what Pein can do about this.

Has to write Pein's lines... Get going on that and stop procrastinating and watching the rain, brooding about Nietzsche was maybe right and how angry he is. How bitter, really. How _bitter as hell they are, _as Konan puts it. Both of them. How they've grown into vengeful, furious, bitter adults, pretend-adults, people so incapable of accepting adult reality that they pretend to be gods and angels.

Though the power, he has to admit, _is _a very good support argument. So much of the rinnegan _is _a leading question of immortality, and from it he and Konan are quietly constructing a retirement plan, drawing out a series of immortality jutsu for themselves. And his rain _is _a kind of omniscience, Konan's ability to scatter herself to thousands of paper butterflies is the same. The rinnegan really _is _a promise of omnipotence, it's power is so bottomless and vast and so _easy _and...

..while Nagato used to be very disturbed by that and still is...

...it's hard to apply morality to that. Conventional morality. Wrong and right, when everything looks so small up from the tower, from the heights of Pein's endless powerful abilities.

And when morality is twisted up in the process of war, when all sides proclaim that their actions are the moral ones, the necessary ones, the justifiable ones. And now Pein can choose any of those justifications he wants. All of them work just fine for him.

Protecting Amegakure, like Yahiko wanted.

And doing away with Hanzou in particular, a final thank you gift to Yahiko's spirit, the fires lit in remembrance for him in all his excessiveness. Ending war- neatly, bloodily, by getting rid of this man, terrifying anyone they didn't bother to kill, blowing apart the civil war he promoted and, in Nagato's opinion, _caused. _Power, terror and mass killing. Tremendously effective.

_It's no crime to murder a murderer. _Madara said. At the time, Madara wore only a half-mask, red with black ink waves all over it. A restless current or a stark pattern of cloud. Or black flames. Amaterasu. The Uchiha clan had some interesting self-mythologizing going on, they named their jutsu after gods, and honestly seemed to edge towards considering themselves divinely chosen. Though that was just Madara, and maybe Madara wasn't really representative. Madara only covered his eyes back then, so as he spoke his white teeth would flash. Like the vivid white fangs of a huge predatory animal. Or like the Cheshire cat, his smile like the half-moon. The red glow of his voice, the hard maple richness of it, his seductive charm. He was so persuasive. _It's only your inaction that troubles you, Nagato. Use your power, feel how powerful you are and I promise all these doubts will leave you. _Glowing like a magical talisman in Nagato's memory, even now. Twelve years later. Madara's incandescent promises, as the sun drowns in it's bloody pool of fire, impales itself on the jagged edge of the horizon, Amegakure's cut throat.

The sun sets. The light begins to darken to a soft soggy blue.

Konan puts down her mechanical pencil. Over a star, a polychoron stellated out to it's crown of thorns, chakra given shape and depth and angle and structure. Because Nagato could see this, see the seams and blueprint lines of chakra itself. See where the jutsu were built from the ground up. Of from the sky down, because he talks about stars. About the sky. And his eyes saw through the prism of chakra, it's pentagram faces, five points and a prismatic center. Five satellite bodies; and at the diamond core, the bright flame-color of Yahiko's hair, Nagato's fiery crown of chakra, of enlightenment.

And a lot of moodiness. But she's used to this. She's known him long enough, and it's certainly no worse than her own foibles. Her habit of chilly intellectual distance. Her preference for crystallizing and blueprint-mapping her rage. And his. And what they plan to do with it. How they plan to remake the world.

By the whip, by the nine-tails. Which is amusing, she thinks, because Nagato has told her that the early ascetics used to beat themselves with nine-tailed scouring whips. They sought spiritual enlightenment through the pain. And really, what are the two of them doing if not an elaborate grandstanding act of self-destruction?

Or of world-destruction, really. Or _deconstruction_, to be exact. She prefers that. Destroying things, taking a wrecking ball to them- this takes no thought or artistry, it accomplishes nothing. Amegakure's final convulsion of a civil war only made her and Nagato into what they are now. To dismantle and reshape is more precise, it's the scalpel and the strategy and the vision. It's Nagato's elegantly depraved spin on Yahiko's hard moral absolutism- scare the world straight. And maybe he really believes this will happen. And maybe it will. But she just wants to hurt it badly.

By design. Pain is educational, after all. She agrees with Nagato there.

She can pinpoint the exact place where her migraine will start, her body is now a precise array of paper, given indexed measurements and watermarks and grain and square binding. There is an Akatsuki meeting at hand. She presses two fingers to her temple, the exact spot. Itachi and Kisame have given notice that they have the four-tails in their hot little hands. So the Leader will have to summon everyone for a meeting and a sealing ritual. She will have to adjust her attitude enough and both of them will have to stay sober this night, which is the real tragedy here. Nagato will have to stop moping.

Which he is. She can feel it. Feel him. Like the memory springing to mind, the moment she saw him, caught in the crossing of firelight, the heat drafts of Hanzou's city-wide funeral pyre. Hundreds of houses burning. His hair and skin glowing, golden, like the burning bush, like the pictures he'd shown her of the Christian holy spirit igniting, tongues of flame dancing over his head. A crown of flames. Nagato.

All his unstable power. And all her stabilizing influence that just makes them both further set into their shared madness. He's around, she can feel him. Through the tower's silence, as if setting the tenor of it's air vibrations, invisible frequencies. Not just Yahiko's power either, other powers. Complicated rinnegan jutsu.

Of attraction. Sometimes she does wonder if the rinnegan changed things between them, if only because it changed _them _so much. Both of them, Nagato is only the one who bears it's full physical brunt directly. She holds the operation together, upholds the support to keep him on his feet, keep him together, in so many ways. And she's not complaining. It's worked out. Between them, the love part, that's worked out very well. It's just the rest of their lives that are ruined.

It's just _them _that's twisted up, ruined. Somehow, some way that doesn't show. Psychologically, Nagato says, but he also says it goes deeper than that. Into esoterica, subconscious and spiritual, you almost need religious terms to describe what's wrong with them.

The two of them...

That's why they stand sometimes, in front of that old heavy-framed mirror upstairs in their non-bedroom. And undress one another; she'll rest her chin on his shoulder and touch all his creases and lines, all the places where he connects through his piercings to his rinnegan wheel of life far underground. All the parts that used to be Yahiko's but now are his; the way he reacts and the way his expression changes, and his eyes change, when she touches him. And he'll pull her in front of him, under his arm to rest against him. Open her cloak and unfasten her top, cup her breasts in his hands, that are now _his _hands, not Yahiko's. It always feels completely different when Nagato touches her. Different from memories of Yahiko's hand on her shoulder, or Yahiko's arms around her... Yahiko's completely different affection, in every way. This body so changed now, Nagato burning through it in ever motion. Watch one another as they do this. Just _look at what they've done to themselves, _look at all of this. The god and the angel. Nagato and Konan. All grown up now, no longer just dirty-faced street children in rags, arrogant teenagers washing off the blood of their victims. Now grown into two twisted adults, wearing black velvet and their moral depravity shamelessly, like they're proud of it.

And- _absolutely _it's a turn on, absolutely they get off on it- absolutely, what they've become. The sheer twisted perversity of it. The sheer obscenity against a world of moral hypocrisies that really never gave a damn about them in the first place. Flaunting their defiance to it, from how they've chosen to think and lead their lives, to all these theatrical Akatsuki clouds and cloaks and daggers, all this pierced costumery. _We're a mess, we really are. _Nagato said to her once, finally as they did this. As they were both flushed and would have to move on to something less teasing, some actual consummation. He was watching them, their eyes in the mirror. _We're really messed up, aren't we? _

And they are. They _absolutely are._

_We want this. _he whispered thinly, their arms around one another. _We know exactly what we're doing and we choose it. And we only want to let ourselves know it a little bit. The parts we find exciting, but otherwise we just want to pretend we don't know._

And that they somehow aren't quite aware of what's going on. Somehow not responsible.

And he's moping for certain, though she doesn't blame him for this. She doesn't get irritated with his moods. She finds him, puts her arms around him. Comforts him. And he comforts her, so in a tragicomic way, it works. And they become capable of living again, as if resuscitated from death one more time, their hearts electrified, linked to one another like the machine-aided rinnegan jutsu in the basement, all his bodies. They become capable of enacting vengeance. If she is an angel, she is an avenging angel. Their bijuu superweapon with blow thousands of miles of city and countryside into the stratosphere, and they can't save themselves. Can't stop themselves.

Because nothing can stop them now.

Because if they didn't do this, what else would they _do _with themselves?


	6. Marked for Death

They want this. They don't want this. They contemplate their indecision. The plan is moving without them.

The yonbi is caught, it's time to go to work. Nagato is around, she can feel his mood saturating the air inside the tower, the rooms folding out all around in squares and ajar doors, the darkening silence now, newly after sunset. The speechwriting must not be going well. She finds him in the living room, a blizzard of paper at his feet. Three fingers of scotch in his hand. "No, it's not going well at all..." he says wearily. "I suppose I feel like I'm lying to them. Or Pein is. But I write all of Pein's lines..."

He's watching the blare of the television with fixed, distant irritability. Looking at people, the eyes of the newscasters and witnesses and talk show hosts. Because he feels the need to connect with the people of Amegakure, and it's harder for him to camouflage his chakra and walk the streets. The rain jutsu and the rinnegan can't really put him on this basic face to face level. It's a need she doesn't share. She kisses the messy red spikes piled over his head. And then his forehead, as he looks up at her with silvered, rippled eyes. He tugs her down into his arms; and it's as if they have no problems, they forget the world around them. They have one another.

They have a beast to seal. Nagato worries about an entire set of things that she would never be bothered by. He has a problem with the uncritical worship of the public- because he fears it might go to his head and encourage his worst impulses. He's embarrassed when Pein is misquoted and criticized by the media- because Pein is personal to him and naturally he takes it personally. He sees a contradiction in that, explains tiredly that this makes Pein a hypocrite- or himself a hypocrite. Then commentary on how Pein isn't self-aware enough to hold contradictory beliefs. The upshot of this is that he is still just the same little boy who wept beside her in the neighborhood safe house. Who tore himself to guilty shreds over an act of self-defense. Just the same boy grown into a slightly drunk man, and herself into something harsh and distorted with rage. And yet somehow, they can comfort one another. Always.

No matter what horrible people they are. Monsters, that's the word Nagato uses. He's switched off the noise of the television, and they cuddle, she holds him, and often the familiarity of that is enough. "You're no more of a hypocrite than any other person." she whispers. "And most don't bother to think about it the way you do."

"And I want vengeance as much as you," he breathes, his lips brushing her cheek. "The avenging angel heralds a god of wrath. In action like an angel, in apprehension like a god. The destroyers of the world, you and I. Make no mistake of that. We're in this together." They're both getting entirely off-subject, they need to go to work but...

"At least you feel something." she whispers against his lips. "That's better than cold indifference to suffering. Or to blindly believe in your own righteousness."

"Like Konoha?" He finally pulls her in for a proper kiss. There's a sturdiness to Yahiko's body that reassures her, it's strength and it's warmth. It seems like the flesh and sinew surround him like amour, like Yahiko's last will and testament for their safety.

"_Because _we want vengeance. But maybe we just want his money to keep the city afloat." This isn't a proper discussion, it's snatches of breath between kisses. He tastes like the scotch, golden and dark and complex.

"Which makes us sound like patriots." Breathless amusement in his whisper. "Maybe we don't really want vengeance at all, we just want to have put our finger on the nuclear button, known that we _could _have done it. But still be unwilling to actually push it..." He gasps, she's grabbed him through his pants. "...blow the world to pieces..."

"Or maybe we're just comfortable." he muses, after they've put their clothes back on, gotten themselves somewhat presentable for the meeting. "Madara gives us not just warmth and shelter, but a place where we can live apart from the entire world. As long as we stay in this tower, we don't have to look at it, or deal with it. He's careful to give us lots of time alone with one another. Maybe knowing what he's going to do to us, and what he wants us to do just doesn't bother us _enough _yet. It's still very comfortable for us to just stay here, put up with him..."

And to just go to the meeting and not tangle with Madara at all. Which is what they do.

____

And it's a waste of their time.

Even worse than usual. She had hoped for less yelling, but Deidara simply yells _twice _as much to make up for Hidan's absence. No one cares that Hidan and Kakuzu are dead, which upsets Nagato. The Leader in fact becomes visibly angry, which worries her. It seems like a show of vulnerability. It would probably be better if the Akatsuki members never saw _any _particular emotion from the Leader. Then Madara goads Deidara into a full-scale temper tantrum, disrupting the meeting, undermining the Leader's authority. Kisame is directly insubordinate and Konan watches silently, Nagato struggles to regain control. She watches Madara playing the clown and seeding chaos... this is exactly how he destroys things. Destroys people. Deidara rushes off into a fight with Itachi's brother and something about it is...

...yes, it's familiar. The clock is ticking on Deidara now, she thinks. Yahiko's photograph finds her with it's dark gaze, the halo of the Amegakure flag. It's like those paintings with eyes that follow you around the room. Or maybe they really are haunted, maybe they aren't over this loss yet. They have to be ready, she thinks, looking down at the photograph in her hands. It won't be long now.

The meeting is over and she's half-undressed up in their tower bedroom. Nagato is still down in his study, the door closed, so she has decided to not disturb him. She puts the photograph back on their bureau. A wet grey sky beyond the raindrops standing on the windowpane. The sky is so low in Amegakure, they are so high up in the clouds. They _are _comfortable.

Just this one problem.

Complicity.

And more then that, how they can learn from it, try to keep it from happening again.

And yet, they never really chose to join Madara at all. They couldn't, they were beaten half to death. Then they were numb with grief. Madara simply swooped in, took care of things. Decided for them. _Maybe you should talk to someone about what happened, _Madara said, after it was all over. She and Nagato just looked at one another, that empty shellshocked look, the empty space between them. They couldn't explain.

And here they are, fifteen years later. Securely under Madara's thumb.

So how did _that _happen? Maybe they doomed themselves from the beginning.

From the moment the rinnegan burst open the pupils of Nagato's eyes, his eyelids swelling like beestings. Konan drew spirals on the gauze pads taped over his eyes, with a soft oil pencil so she wouldn't hurt him. She was drawn to it's geometric perfection. Nagato was drawn into all kinds of esoteric philosophy, both of them trying to figure out what it was in their own peculiar way. Yahiko peered under the bandages like he wasn't sure if he was grossed out, pleased or jealous. And while Nagato was hesitant to touch it, to delve into it, he agreed to use it when necessary. They all agreed to protect one another. But maybe this is where the big mistake was made. Maybe she and Yahiko shouldn't have encouraged Nagato to use it at all.

And then? Jiraiya left. Faded away into the bands of mist drifting through early morning drizzle. Yahiko became their leader again, and maybe she and Nagato would have gotten themselves together on their own, their training had given them some confidence. But Yahiko was faster, so he got them moving, and off they went back to the little thatch cottage. She and Nagato sized up what they had been left with- a bit of food, the rent paid. Their ninjutsu training. That ghostly trace of fear on one another's face as they exchanged one quiet, despairing glance, Amegakure's long hooked shadow reaching out to grab them by the throat. Yahiko didn't notice. He was on the phone, sweet-talking their landlord into letting them stay a bit longer. Yahiko was good at charming people into giving him things. And maybe she and Nagato shouldn't have let him keep doing it. Maybe they could have found another way. But it worked so well for the three of them. Yahiko was determined to do things his way, why bother to try to stop him?

The two of them couldn't have stopped Yahiko anyway, he could talk _them _into almost anything. Maybe they'd have a shot at it now, as adults, but as children they were just too shy. And it did work; so did Yahiko's other talent for stealing. They needed to eat, it was no time to argue morality. _We do this because surviving is more important. _Nagato said. And Yahiko nodded, slapped him on the back, and grinned. He'd been out picking pockets, filching wallets, leveraging his ninjutsu to be an even better thief. His coat was bunched around a big heavy lump. He tossed it down at their feet and it spilled coins and bills and jewelry, gold and silver, the sun flashing over bright metals and the anthracite gleam in Yahiko's eye.

They certainly had no arguments about spending that money. They waited by the aqueduct as Yahiko went to fence the valuables, guarded the rest between them. She folded lilies out of bleached paper and Nagato dropped them, their harsh chemical whiteness, into the rusty water of the canal. They watched the flowers drift down into the dark mouth of the connecting pipe. And then, when a refugee sprung up from behind the pumps to mug them, Nagato snapped his neck with a wind jutsu and she put the flower in her hands through his chest. Sixteen petals turned to scalloped razors, opened and spun like an amour piercing bullet. It sawed right though him and came out the other side, all it's petals red and wet and glittering like a mirrorball. Pieces of heart tissue came with it, dark and floppy like leaves. They stripped the body of money, weapons, jewelry- threw the rest into the canal. They agreed that it had been necessary to kill in self defense. And...

...Yahiko was right, they had changed. Nagato had changed. Maybe this was it, the wrong move that put them on the long downhill slide into Madara's hands. Maybe it was this early, this casual. They showed Yahiko what they had done, and he nodded. _Good, _he said. They had to be willing to defend themselves.

At all costs. And they had to have a certain relaxed attitude to morality. Maybe moreso than any other ninja, since they were without an organized shinobi system to provide any guidelines or enforced practices. Amegakure turned on the law of the jungle at that point. So either they would be willing to do whatever it took to survive, or they'd be killed and scrambled over by some other desperate citizen. It was what it was. So it was necessary.

So was money. Off they went to work as ninja. And had no serious problems finding work at all, their skill spoke for itself. Training by someone of Jiraiya's level was almost unheard of in Amegakure, the shinobi infrastructure was demolished. Yahiko got the contracts for them, and at first they just did little piecemeal missions, bloodless work like guarding property or courier runs. But there was another job a young ninja could do. In Amegakure. And probably nowhere else, but the money was good and it didn't sound that bad on paper. It didn't sound that bad when Yahiko sat them down, said it wasn't a big deal, but... Well, he was just saying, but they could make a whole lot more money. Much faster. If they were still okay with it.

Okay with killing people. Because a child ninja, a child soldier, a desperate starving kid from the streets all added up to a small, agile, harmless-looking and cheap assassin. One the targets almost never saw coming. Yahiko had his speech ready, his survival versus morality argument. But he didn't need it. Nagato said he'd learned to manage his conscience in the face of necessity. Maybe having done it once, it was just easier to do it the second time. Or to contemplate doing it. The only real difference this time was that the target bled violently, they all got splashed. It was a big mess. But they'd never cut anyone's jugular before, they had no idea it sprayed blood like that. They figured out how to get blood out of their clothes and hair later. And at any rate, they got used to it.

So if she's going to play this game of second-guessing their past actions, it was probably already too late by then. They were only ten years old. After that, they killed other people's enemies for a while. They had few advantages over other kids who tried to do this work. They had one another, they had their training, they could endure the emotional kickback better, maybe. They had the rinnegan, so they could handle it when their employers felt it was time to purge the evidence and dispose of the hired murder weapons. They could set Nagato upon anyone, any client who decided it was easier to kill the punk kids than pay them for services rendered. They did that for three years. And maybe that was where they got the idea of just killing anyone who got in their way.

Maybe that was where they started to get comfortable. She remembers what it felt like- like they'd never have to be scared and powerless again. The rinnegan meant they would never starve, and they would also never have to cower in fear. They would never have to endure being terrorized by something bigger and more powerful. They found a nice place to live in a nice area of town. And this was also where Yahiko started to run around with other people, other kids. It was understood that they were not his friends the way she and Nagato were his friends. But the fact remained that Yahiko was a restless thrillseeker and she and Nagato preferred to stay home with their nose stuck in a book. So Yahiko ran the streets and got into mischief with some other kids like himself. Troublemakers. But so was Yahiko. And then Yahiko's troublemaker friends turned into Yahiko's gang member friends. And suddenly they were doing work for gang leaders. Lots of people who needed killing on all sides, lots of clients who'd rather kill the contractor than pay them. And that meant that soon enough they were killing gang leaders, they were purging splinter factions, they were looting entire arms of neighbourhood gangs. And no one could figure out how the hell these kids were doing it.

Which is how the rumors started. And how they started to bend rumor to their benefit.

To make themselves seem mythic and more fearsome than they were. It wasn't that the rinnegan was secret so much that no one _could _really believe it was there, it was easier to believe in child demons, vengeful ghosts of war. Orphans slaughtered, their millions of grasping hands reaching up from the twisted masses of bones, the mass graves sunken into the ocean like buried treasure. Coalescing into three otherwise completely unremarkable children.

Which was also probably where they started to get their reputation.

And where they would reek of blood when they came home. Where they learned to wash it off with rubbing alcohol and lemon juice because nothing else could get the smell off. It was worse than the smell of the fires Yahiko set, or of burning flesh. That memory of smelling like lemons and alcohol for a year and a half is sharply drawn, even more so than any of the victims or their faces. But never mind, she'd rather remember Yahiko putting his arm around Nagato. Singing his song about the boy seeing his friend off, assuring him that it would go fine. The rest was just work, work was necessary. All ninjas make this selective calculation about what to remember. A floating paper flower of a memory. White, unmarked. Dark waters all around it.

Well, anyway. They survived. Nagato came back that night, the task completed, scrubbed his hands with lemony alcohol and threw his clothes into the incinerator because they were stained so badly. The target's heart had burst, but they didn't think too hard about what the rinnegan did to people as long as it made them dead. They repeated that several times a week, five years running then. Lots of work. Because Yahiko was a good hustler and a talented criminal...

And she was a good assassin. So was Nagato. He was actually better at it than either herself or Yahiko, scarily good at it. And you couldn't argue with the benefits. They had an even nicer place to live, in a safer part of town. They could afford all the luxuries they wanted, things they could have never had before. Books and drafting supplies for herself and Nagato, concert tickets and expensive clothes and jewelry and frivolous things for Yahiko, for all of them. It was comforting, and most of all to Yahiko. His family had been poor, after all. He liked to dress well, flaunting their wealth, or what would be wealth. What would become wealth. Status symbols, because they were suddenly starting to actually _have _status. They were fifteen.

And two things were happening.

The first seemed like yet another phase for Yahiko. His gangster friends had become his party friends. Other young people with their hands on money, whether from being the children of the black market controllers, the syndicate bosses, or from the top level soldiers of the gangs, the winners of the citywide streetfight for dominance. Other soldiers of fortune, Yahiko woud say, and laugh. Like it was funny. He would go out with these people, go to strut their stuff in the glossy enclaves of the criminal rich. That was where the money was, the only money in the entire city. Yahiko would laugh about the police. He would be invited to come to these places, drink and play cards and chase girls. He would be under the wing of someone very powerful. And these people, their complicated world of adult games of money and influence...

...made herself and Nagato feel small and shy and intimidated, even though Yahiko took them along now and then. They just didn't have his easy confidence. They hid in corners, mostly. Nursed drinks they were too young to have. Though this was when Nagato noticed the disconnect with reality.

And whispered to her, leaning in to be heard over the sound system. Because Amegakure by day was all pockmarked concrete and rain beading off rusted metal. These places were like the rippling neon reflecting in the puddles by night. Hidden and otherworldly. The people there glittered, dressed up like an old film noir movie. The syndicates and the crooked cops and the most powerful gang leaders, the militia and the nationalist party powerbrokers. The insurgency's brilliant guerrilla warlords. Their bright talented soldiers as sharp and glittery as a wet blade. Their lieutenants and their muscle and their hard tactical thinkers, their assassins, their gold-plated diamond-studded paramilitary machine. And the three of them just another set of gleaming expensive weapons. Like a fanciful costume drama to blot out the reality outside. Everyone went a little crazy during wars, Nagato said. And immediately after.

And it made them want to believe in fairy dust. A god and an angel rather than just another pair of politicians. The fantasy was so much more compelling, everyone was burnt out on reality. No one wanted more reality. And neither did they.

But all of that was Madara's idea, they just must have become susceptible to it themselves. Yahiko really got off on it, the idea of themselves as demonic children haunting the night, killing brutally and then burning houses down. It was so out of control. They were out of control right with him.

They were in fact becoming very distracted from Yahiko's ongoing antics. They had some of their own going. They'd always preferred to stay home, to read, to talk, to have long intricate conversations about mathematics and theology, the place where they met in the sacred geometries. This was all a bit too much chat and too little action for Yahko. So he would go out into the neon underworld beneath the black ocean of wet asphalt. And she and Nagato were alone with one another a whole lot. They were sixteen. And anyone else in the world, anyone but the two of them, could see exactly what was happening.

_Strangers _could see it. The people at the cafes could see it, she remembers half-acquaintances making sly comments. They did sort of know other people too. When the rain wasn't so heavy, when Yahiko had torn the storm system open and the sun was flashing in the puddles, they would go for long walks over the bridges, into the canalworks. Into the fringe of the lower city levels, where the new intelligensia was just starting to materialize. Like a million colorful pieces of a shattered mosaic coming back together. In the teahouses where the street poets and musicians gathered to smoke and drink cheap coffee. The graffiti artists who got colorful waterproof epoxies through the black market, washed the concrete moonscape with flowers and rainbows and psychedelia. They met all kinds of really bizarre people, other weird eccentrics like themselves, but they didn't notice anyone else. They weren't paying attention to anyone else.

Yahiko said, teasing them- _you guys are such weirdos, no wonder you have the hots for one another!_

Yahiko said- _what? Of course it's okay with me. You guys are like my little sister and brother. And _I _have a date. With a hot babe._

And he said- _geez, would you guys just kiss already? _And then he laughed as the two of them flushed bright red. He said- admit it. Admit you're in love with one another. They were almost seventeen.

And they were.

____

Something else was happening.

Other than their complete loss of perspective, that is. Because at one point they would have understood that they were powerful for their niche, for their small pond in Amegakure's ocean, but they were certainly not the biggest fish. They survived mostly by _not _picking fights with people who they couldn't handle, who had strange and fearsome hidden justu of their own. But then they started to like it too much. The rush and power of killing, of feeling like no one could touch them. Like they really were demons, supernatural and fired by unseen powers. When in reality, Hanzou probably looked at them the way she and Nagato now look at their death threats, the pipebombs mailed to city administration, the kind of people who do these things. Either crazies or amateurs or both. Not a threat.

But Yahiko's party friends had turned into his political friends. At first she and Nagato couldn't quite believe this, Yahiko never liked to be serious about anything other than protecting them. He was an unlikely radical to say the least. He'd been a garden variety hustler, he'd wallowed in luxury until he was tired of it. But it was as if he'd finally found something to believe in beyond just their need to survive. He started going to nationalist party meetings. And they slowly remembered that yes, Yahiko's parents had been nationlists. His siblings had been militiamen. The collected wisdom of Yahiko's father was full of things like standing your ground, defending your neighborhood. His entire family had been involved in it. Yahiko had been too young. Well, not anymore.

And Jiraiya had always sort of implied, sort of treated them like they were meant to grow up, survive- do something important. That their lives had some actual _meaning. _Something other than just being killers for hire. So she and Nagato exchanged glances, slowly, behind Yahiko's back. Yahiko didn't notice. He was hanging a huge Amegakure flag on the wall.

He said- _this is our country, not that scum from Kirikagure and Konohagure that come here to cause trouble. We need to take our country back. _

He said- _I was born in Amegakure, my brother and sister were born in Amegakure, my father and mother were born here, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, everyone. _

He said- _that piece of shit isn't from here._

He was talking about Hanzou. The most powerful of the warlords, the ruler of Amegakure. The sworn enemy of the insurgency. To even say it was a civil war was to make an intensely dangerous statement. You couldn't say that around Yahiko's new political friends- or around _Yahiko _for that matter. There were _not _two civil factions fighting in Amegakure. There was an occupying invading force, and there was a population fighting back. _He's from the Mist. _Yahiko would say. A cold light in his eyes. Like Hanzou had worn out his welcome about fifty years ago and should be leaving. _Oh, he's leaving all right. _Yahiko said. _In the back of a hearse. _

Maybe that was it. The moment it became personal to Yahiko. It wasn't for money or survival when they accepted that mission. The photograph was taken that day, the bright dyed-silk flag in the background. Blue and white. Water and peace. Wishful thinking. Yahiko haloed in the colors of the flag.

In retrospect, Konan can see exactly how that mission order got into his hands. It must have been blazingly obvious to the party leaders, as obvious as it is to her, sizing up Deidara, Hidan, seeing a hothead with a quick fuse and too much carelessness. Someone who's overconfidence could take out a few enemies, maybe pull a few right down in flames with him. Someone who would get himself killed before he could become inconvenient to party goals. Yahiko didn't see, didn't care. He just wanted to get his hands around Hanzou's throat. They did a complicated hit on twenty of Hanzou's best soldiers instead.

Took them unaware, mostly. In their beds, asleep. Drunk and passed out, with their mistresses or with their families, whole houses burned down around them. A nice little flesh wound on Hanzou's operation. And while that was probably enough to do it, Yahiko wasn't happy, he had to keep chipping away at Hanzou, he had to start killing without even a mission order or money to justify it, to put some kind of control on it. She can't claim to have felt any differently. Because Hanzou had started the war, Hanzou had played the factions against one another, Hanzou had pulled dirty tricks to keep the fighting going and tear Amegakure apart to keep himself on top. And it was only what any other warlord did to preserve their power, but it was personal. It was _really _personal by then.

And that went on for a while, as they remained too insignificant for Hanzou to bother with. Until they _were _worth the effort, which was when Hanzou had them killed. Yahiko killed. Herself and Nagato almost killed.

So what happened? Nothing happened, nothing new. Nothing any more stupid and violent than all of the _other _stupid and violent things they did. They all caught that reckless fever of revenge. And when it was all over, there was Madara. Right on time to save them. Like he'd planned it.

Somehow...

So maybe there is nothing they can do now. They are sunken deep into Madara's plans. They've been on this path for a very long time. There's no point in trying to interfere, Deidara will probably be dead within the week.

____

A flat, grey morning. Rain like the sky itself is indifferent. And desensitized...

And feels nothing. And really _is _a cynical liar, as insincere as Madara's smile. But the fact remains, Nagato thinks, they _do _use these tactics. Cynical as they are.

They use them.

Nagato writes Pein's speech in the grey drizzle that follows the meeting. At first the city beneath the windowsill looks like the wreckage of factory machines, shiny like mirrors, the rain turns everything wet and the streetlights glint hot halogen orange from the complicated cityface. This complicated plan of theirs...

But when the streetlights wink out, there is only the thick flat mass of cloud. A very dull grey color. And nothing but other greys in the city beneath. But finally he can imagine it, what Pein would say. His imagination is like a flame under low heat, greyness all around it. Understated order to his thoughts. So this seems less delusional and crazy and more like a soft-focus dream.

The meeting doesn't go well at all, and afterwards he's too angry, maybe, to sleep. Anger is not something Pein feels. Or maybe anger is _all _Pein feels, and because he has no other emotions to compare it to, it ceases to be an emotion at all and is just the nature of Pein's thoughts. Or maybe the human mind behind Pein needs to loosen up a bit, so Nagato stays up, locks himself in his study and gets properly drunk. So all his thoughts are unfocused and soft and fluid... And his imagination can conjure the god. You have to lose your sense of reason to become Pein. You really do have to lose your mind.

Thinks about it... weaves the thoughts together like clouds, stitching raindrops and blotting out the sky. Why they protect Amegakure and what they promised Yahiko and how a bloody past might have a paradoxical hand in future glory, because redemption is so important to Amegakure. It's been down in the muck and stomped upon by the five shinobi nations for almost a century. The thoughts were too fractured before, but now the words come together and he hears Pein's voice, sees Pein's will. It's like an ayahuasca vision, Pein's black and white theology turning to rainbows and shiny tin-plated stars, technicolor in high definition. Hyper-reality rather than an escape from it. Then the rinnegan ripples down from this state of consciousness, he drinks more, feels better, and goes to join Konan in bed.

Falls into the long post-sealing naps they take together, eighteen hours of heavy restorative sleep and then maybe a day of lazily doing nothing. Cuddling in bed together, curling his fingers around hers as she sleeps, curled up against him. The scotch mist and the flash burns of the sealing headache lose their high color, fade away. Somewhere in the long slant of white daylight over the bed, she wakes as he dozes, her arms come around him. He wakes against her heart, her fingers in his hair. The sun winking out for the streetlights, turning into the darkened mirror, the night cityscape again.

The pattern of dozing and waking slows down his perceptions, and he sinks into the feeling of her warmth, her breathing, the faint hint of chemical flowers from her hair. The way she smells like sandalwood now, woody notes. She's becoming paper as he becomes more like... Something even more abstracted. Like the magical statues of ancient cultures, like the clay golems and the Anubis masks. Graven idols, both of them. Time slowed enough to feel it and not intellectualize it, maybe. Sleeping together in this sense can almost be more intimate. Madara doesn't call. Neither does the administrative chain. The world is silent.

The picture frame has moved. It's been picked up and looked at. And Yahiko's face is like a faded image in the Egyptology books downstairs. Magical, but gone forever. Something like that. Nagato looks at it from across the room, the strange angle and the slow touch of Konan's heart under his ear. Out of reach, lost forever. Sleep weighs his eyelids down, and he considers that there's nothing anyone can do to convince Deidara, you can't make him think that dying before his twentieth birthday _isn't _the perfect idea. Or won't give him the final blaze of glory he wants. Maybe it worked for Yahiko, he wanted something similar. He seemed at peace in the vision that followed in the stardust, the twilight place of the rinnegan where Nagato saw him, argued with him. Lost him.

Konan probably still worries about it, he can see it in the subtle deepening of shadows on her sleeping face. He knows she tries to make sense of these things, it's her critical faculties trying to reassert themselves and force logic and order out of this... This afterlife they find themselves in. The gods and demon tricksters will send illusions to confound the logical, he thinks. This is the part of his philosophy that loses her, the way her shapes lose him as soon as they vanish into four and five dimensions. This is why the god and the angel have one another...

And from there he can dream about the love and the way it feels and it's dizzy tilt of gravity under him. But not go too far, because then it's a question of whether this is something they bought with Yahiko's death. If it really is a bargain with the devil. And that's not something you want to think of while cuddling with your wife. Your almost-wife. Your wife in everything but a legal document you'll both get around to signing when you're gotten the reek of the devil off your hands.

But the devil always gets you in the end. He puts his hand on Deidara, draws him into the crosshairs of his shadow. A kiss of death, that's the concept Nagato is thinking of. A fatal laying of hands, like the shadow of the angel at passover. Madara cutting Deidara out of the crowded multi-sided personality conflict of Akatsuki. Out of the herd. The Leader looks, his eyes going through Deidara like an x-ray scanner, looking into Deidara's busy blue eyes and seeing it, Deidara growling and quieting down. Looking away.

Like he knows it and he chooses it. So there's nothing anyone can do. No one could stop Yahiko either, and this is just a preternatural echo of him. Out of their control. Like the rinnegan's rose window eye closing, snapping shut like the steel petals of a camera shutter. Being decisive, it seemed, about exactly who would die.


End file.
